The Secret Sauce of Great Teams

TODAY’S TIP: There are 5 key ingredients to building great teams

In my Italian family, food was love.

Sunday came with a big pasta dinner and my grandmother’s red sauce bubbling gently to a simmer in the pot on the stove-top. We have lots of wonderful cooks in my family, but no one could make sauce like my grandmother. Even if she gave you the recipe, your food would come out good, but not great.

Today, I confess to take-out more often than homemade meals. But I love my work and carry my grandmother’s ethic with me.  As I coach, I help leaders build a great culture to achieve bold goals.

There are always these question to consider:

What differentiates good from great?

What’s the secret sauce?

Critical to every organization’s success are the people that work there. And critical to the performance of these people is how they work in teams to get big audacious things done –together.

But what makes team work effective and productive enough to achieve these big goals? What distinguishes the good teams from the great?

I’ve worked with hundreds of teams and culled through lots of research, such as Google’s findings on teams and authors such as Lencioni, Caillet and Katzenbach, to tease out the components that distinguish the boilerplate from the truly great.

Turns out there are 5 key ingredients to great teamwork:

1.       Inspiring Purpose

2.       Team Norms

3.       Supporting Each Other

4.       Ownership of the Work

5.       Trustworthiness

In upcoming posts, I’ll offer more details on these five key ingredients and actionable steps you can take as a leader to put them to work in your teams.

Happy spring to everyone. Wishing you a time of growth and renewal this season.