Most organizations generally have two types of employees – those who tackle daily transactional matters and those who’re agitated to do more. Most managers and leaders build teams with a balance of both types so that transactional and strategic matters can collectively be addressed. But not exponential leaders. They build exponential teams!
What’s an exponential team? While a team with an incremental mindset works hard to make things better, with an exponential mindset that same team can converge their effort to make things different. And by doing so they support their organization to achieve exponential growth that’s not merely 10%, but instead it’s 10X.
As a leader, if you’re pursuing a dream to exponentially grow your organization you’ll need the support of an exponential team. And here’s how you can build such a team.
1. Mindset and Alignment to MTP
The exponential mindset is probably the number one pivotal point in your team’s strive for excellence. Most team’s operate with an incremental mindset that helps them achieve linear growth. Their focus is primarily on organizational outcomes, KPIs or their own individual outcomes. In essence, they’re delivering what their call of duty mandates from them. This limits their contributions and thus prevents them from achieving exponential growth. A team that’s aligned to its organization’s Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) is more emotionally tied in with it. With this link their commitment, drive and ability grows exponentially. They’ll not only understand what’s expected of them, but will also go the extra mile, be more innovative and creative to succeed.
2. Friendly and Synchronized
Arianna Huffington once said “I would rather have somebody much less brilliant and who’s a team player, who’s straightforward, than somebody who is very brilliant and toxic to the organization”. Like most exponential leaders she believes in the power of connecting people and creating a workplace environment that’s friendly and facilitates cohesiveness. After all, to really align your talent you need to throw out all bureaucracy, egos and red-tape. You need to foster teamwork in a way that’s fun and energetic. Your teams shouldn’t only like one each another but get along really well. And that’s across the board and across all functions. The more synchronized your team is the more they’ll strive towards a common objective and goal. They’ll even facilitate each another’s success. Rather than having functions only interested in achieving their own outcomes and goals, an exponential team operates in an environment where everyone looks out for and supports one another.
3. Empowerment
Nothing turns off talent more than roadblocks to creativity and innovation. An exponential team is completely empowered to make its own choices, mistakes, and grow as rapidly as it chooses. It’s far beyond just delegation of authority and responsibility which would enable them to achieve results. It’s providing your team the tools, systems and necessary support and guidance to excel and achieve more than just the results that’s expected of them. Empowerment creates a deeper sense of purpose for your exponential team. Their commitment and contributions magnify as they understand and feel deeply rooted with the organization. And ultimately, the organization’s success will be perceived as their personal success and gain.
4. Trust and Transparency
To truly make all this work your exponential team of talented individuals demand trust, respect and belief in their abilities. Micromanaging will only help you achieve linear growth. To grow exponentially you’ll not only empower your teams, but trust them to do the right thing. The days of secret five year business plans are over. Along with it, closed-door top management meetings are also history. Today’s workforce demands knowledge about their organization. They need something to believe in and align their personal purpose and goals with. Transparency is a major factor in how well you’ll be able to achieve alignment and create an exponential mindset. And this responsibility falls on the shoulders of the senior management who need to alter their own mindset to allow transparency to prevail.
5. The Management
Perhaps everything exponential in an organization is possible and achievable based on the power of the management. I’m not discounting the efforts of the entire employee population. But what I am suggesting is that to successfully implement your plans, ideologies and exponential mindset you need to carefully assess your management team and make some tough choices. Take a good look at your management team and their behavior during meetings. Pay attention to their communication skills, the underlying intentions of what they’re saying and even observe their body language. Do you find yourself among a senior leadership that’s synced, aligned to the organization’s MTP, friendly, trustworthy and above all, in possession of the exponential mindset? If you can’t confidently say yes to that question, all your efforts to create an exponential team will fall short.
[Tweet “To be a successful manager means to make yourself operationally redundant.”]
You can achieve this through trust, transparency, empowerment, a friendly atmosphere and by aligning your team to the organization’s MTP. Essentially by implementing these five techniques you’ll be able to build a high performing team that’s geared up to take on rapid changes, tough challenges and deliver innovative results – in short, an exponential team.
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