Common Sense Leadership: Being about the Team

Being a highly effective boss and leader is not difficult. As I like to say, it's common sense – be a good person and do the right things.

Last week, I wrote about humility, which is the foundation of growth. It allows us to admit that we can always be better at our work and as leaders. This quality enables us to strive for continuous improvement, which is a critical success factor for each of us, as well as for our teams and our organizations.

Another key quality of Common Sense Leadership is being about the team.

Here are some examples of actions, behaviors and attitudes that will improve your team's performance:

• Encouraging and helping colleagues do great work and succeed
• Feeling that the competition is outside our organization, not inside
• Celebrating others' successes
• Providing helpful feedback
• Being a great teammate (We'll all have good, specific ideas based on our own experiences as to how to be a great teammate)
• Sharing credit and the spotlight

These are a few particular actions and behaviors, but being about the team also involves our attitude. It's having a quiet confidence that allows us to genuinely care about and be invested in our teammates, to root for them and to be sincerely happy for their successes. Being about the team is also allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, knowing that we have development needs (we all do) and asking our colleagues for their help and feedback shows that we trust them.

One exciting truth to being about the team is that it’s contagious. The whole team's performance picks up.

Bob Burg and John David Mann, the authors of one of my favorite books, The Go-Giver, have a new book about to be published titled, It's Not About You.  Bob gave me a manuscript copy to read. I thoroughly endorse the principle: to be truly successful, we must have the attitude that it's about the other person(s), i.e., our clients and our team. Humility, quiet confidence and modesty are all related to being about the team.  

Though I usually do not use sports figures as examples for business leaders, I would like to describe a recent example from the sports world of how much modesty means.Derek Jeter, the shortstop and team captain of the New York Yankees, had his 3,000th hit in the major leagues two weeks ago, which few batters in the long history of baseball have achieved. He did it in grand fashion, five hits in five times at bat, including a home run that proved to be the game winning run.

A packed Yankee Stadium and the sports media went nuts over Jeter's splendid performance and when interviewed on national television after the game, he was asked how it felt to reach such a rare milestone. He genuinely replied, "It felt great that we won the game; it would not be a special occasion for me if we had not won."

Surely, Jeter is a wonderful example of a great team captain and leader, being about the team, not himself.

This attitude is what we, as business leaders, should emulate. If we manage to do so, we will enjoy having a special place in in the hearts and minds of our colleagues, because we are about the team.