Vision, Mutual Support, Trust and Appreciation are the Four Pillars of Great Teams

Great teams of supportive, inspired and driven team members, where no individual member is driven by their own self-interest or ego, are the most cohesive and deliver the best long term performance. Once you have these crucial elements in place, where you have a real team of supportive and cohesive individuals, who have a clear vision for the future and everyone understands their individual role in making that vision real. You have created an unstoppable team whose whole, is far greater than the sum of its individual parts. The synergy that flows from a team of driven individuals with clarity of vision, no individual ego expectations and who support each other is infinite.

This cohesive unit must operate within the realm of real and meaningful trust. The individual team members do not need to necessarily like each other, but they must respect and completely trust each other. Trust and respect are the bookends of a cohesive team and crucial if you want to create the solidarity necessary to achieve and sustain high performance, within your team.

The best way to foster trust between team members is to encourage a culture of always giving what you want to receive, to other team members, before you expect to receive anything from them in return. If you want to be trusted by anyone in your team, then you should extend trust to them first. The most important ingredients when fostering trust between team members is honesty, transparency, complete integrity and a willingness to show your vulnerability when appropriate and to accept and support any vulnerability, which may show up in any of the other team members.

Action Idea: Invest a day into getting to know each other better. Brainstorm a minimum of five ways team members and team leaders can demonstrate trust going forward.
Use these ideas as starting points:
•Be willing as leadership to be more transparent about the current financial position of the organisation.
•Share your real financial goals and challenges with the team.
•Commit to be transparent about how information is shared and communicated to the team
•Be willing to expose your vulnerabilities
•Each team member should share their own fears, past failures and shortcomings
•Instil a culture where you lift the veil and remove the need to posture and pretend, allow each team member to be authentic.
•Eliminate the tendency to gossip and understand any alliances or factions that may exist within your team
•Explore how each team member can earn trust
•Create a commitment to always demonstrate you can be trusted by always doing what you say and always being on time

Explore all the above ideas and come up with a strategy and commitment from each team member to always act in trustworthy fashion, where each team member always works to earn the trust of every other team member. These trust elements must become ingrained and part of the teams’ culture.

The last element needed to create a team of super achievers is appreciation. Unfortunately this really crucial element is often forgotten and team members feel neglected. Appreciation is the fuel that drives all the other elements we have covered before and is often the reason that really great teams fail. Feeling significant and appreciated is a basic need within all human beings. This need to be appreciated starts at birth and never goes away. This need to be appreciated and to be recognised is an integral part of our hunger to live lives of meaning and significance.

The secret to working this principal effectively, within your team is to understand that each individual within your team has a different way they feel valued and appreciated. Do not assume that giving appreciation to your team members, the way you want to receive it yourself, will be the perfect way to show appreciation to your team. The way things work for you may be completely wrong for your team. The only way to ensure that you get this crucial element in place properly is to simply ask each team member, how they would like to be appreciated.

Action Idea: Pick five members of your team and sit with them, explaining how much you appreciate them and their efforts. Play open cards with them and tell them that you are unsure how to express your appreciation to them. Ask them individually and collectively how they would like to be appreciated. Armed with this information, you are equipped to show meaningful appreciation to your team in the future.

Bring all the elements I have described in this article into your team and you will greatly improve their performance and level of satisfaction and happiness. If you diligently work on using all the principals I have described in this and my previous articles, your team will be unstoppable and you can achieve any level of success you desire.

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