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Activate techniques and strategies to build and maintain a healthy team as a leader.
1. Clarify core values.
Building a healthy team begins with establishing clear values and a mission statement to cultivate trust and accountability. When everyone understands the company's principles, collaboration towards shared goals becomes smoother, fostering a positive and inclusive work environment.
Define core values and mission to guide team cohesion.
Maintain open communication about values, fostering trust and accountability.
Ensure decisions align with values, promoting teamwork and support.
2. Lean into human resources.
Employees are not just tools for productivity but individuals with needs and emotions. Like renewable resources, their energy should be harnessed, not depleted. Empowering and supporting employees increases productivity and innovation and lowers turnover rates.
Understand what humans need to thrive—and give it to them.
Champion people-centric policies and culture in your workplace.
Switch the focus from mining resources to renewable energy.
3. Cultivate personal connection.
Knowing your team is essential—as people with different motivations, goals, interests, and challenges. Knowing how to motivate people can drive higher productivity and achievement. Understanding career goals lets you challenge and develop them in mutually beneficial ways.
Understand individual motivations and needs.
Identify and align with team members’ long-term goals.
Train people well and treat them even better.
4. Define roles and responsibilities.
People and teams work best when every team member understands their contribution. To this end, your team members need clearly defined roles and responsibilities. This gives individuals a structure to experience challenges, achieve success, ensure clarity, and avoid misalignment.
Ensure roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and documented.
Make sure you understand what every team member does.
Always link individual roles to wider team and business objectives.
Balance workload fairly across your team.
5. Lead by example.
As a leader, your actions shape the behavior of your team. Demonstrating positive conduct sets a standard for others to follow and builds trust. Without leading by example, it's unrealistic to anticipate desired behavior from your team, and any hypocrisy undermines your leadership credibility.
Leadership is a practice—ask for coaching to develop the skills you need.
Find great leaders in your organization and emulate them—even ask them for mentorship.
Think about what behaviors matter and consciously embody them.
6. Create a democracy, not a dictatorship.
A democratic leadership style encourages open communication and participation, ensuring all team members feel valued. While the leader makes the final decisions, they consider input from the entire team. This approach fosters innovation and direction, unlike autocratic or laissez-faire styles.
Learn to listen more than you talk.
Guide discussion, but don’t dominate.
Assimilate different options to find the best way forward.
7. Check egos at the door.
Prioritize the team to ensure individual egos don’t undermine team success. Emphasize collective goals to foster teamwork and support. Bold team goals and result-based rewards can motivate collaboration, eliminating blame culture and individual competition to enhance teamwork.
Clearly state the team goals you need your people to achieve together.
Reward teamwork—especially if it bypasses individual bottlenecks.
Ditch blame culture and take team ownership of successes and failures.
8. Hire and empower smart people.
Micromanagement stifles autonomy, hindering contribution, challenge, and consideration. Trusting your team's expertise fosters innovation and reduces dependency. Avoid micromanagement to encourage initiative and prevent bottlenecking, cultivating a culture of leadership rather than dependency.
Resist the urge to micromanage— delegate, delegate, delegate.
Give team members scope to make their own decisions within boundaries.
Coach colleagues to have the confidence to reach their own conclusions where appropriate.
9. Communicate clearly and regularly.
Clear communication is essential for trust, collaboration, and team productivity. Establish transparent processes, repeat key information, and cascade updates from senior management. Foster open communication channels for addressing concerns, sharing ideas, and resolving issues privately.
Model positive communication for your team.
Be accessible and provide appropriate lines of communication.
Make time for regular meetings.
Try new ways of communicating.
10. Give and seek feedback.
Feedback fuels improvement. Healthy teams prioritize timely, constructive feedback to enhance performance, develop skills, and celebrate successes. Tailor feedback delivery to individual personalities and choose appropriate settings. Invite feedback as a leader to model continuous improvement.
Provide timely, constructive feedback to support specific objectives.
Be intentional in how, why, and where you provide feedback.
Get regular feedback on team and company culture to drive continual improvement.
11. Respect different working styles.
It sounds obvious, but everyone is different, from contemplative introverts who need time and space to think things through to outgoing extroverts who thrive on interaction and team energy. But by identifying different working styles—and proactively seeking to accommodate them—you can help your team work more effectively together.
Discuss each style’s strengths, challenges, and contributions to the team
Encourage accommodation and model that behavior in your interactions.
Be prepared to give extra support to different styles if they need to go out of their comfort zone.
12. Build trust and psychological safety.
Trust is key for psychological safety, allowing team members to contribute freely without fear of ridicule or retribution. Enable innovation and boundary-pushing by creating an environment where failure is not feared and help can be requested without judgment. Model trust through integrity and clear communication.
Say what you’ll do and do what you say.
Explain your decision-making process.
Encourage mutual respect between team members.
Recognize past experiences and offer support.
13. Model resilience.
Resilience means bouncing back from setbacks and failures, crucial for success in today's dynamic environment. Encourage a culture of experimentation and view failure as a learning opportunity. Provide mentoring and coaching to strengthen resilience and support colleagues. Lead by example, demonstrating a growth mindset.
Encourage appropriate risk-taking, even knowing activities could fail.
Reward effort, innovation, and engagement—not just success.
Learn from failure—assess what worked and what didn’t.
Get together as a team when you’ve shared a tough experience.
14. Surface conflict.
Manage intra-team conflict effectively and constructively, fostering trust and psychological safety. Openly resolving issues encourages future problem-solving and reduces disruptive conflict. As a leader, establish clear rules for conflict resolution and promote individual and team resilience to facilitate productive conversations.
Give opportunities and permission for team members to surface conflict.
Support appropriate challenge and critique within the team.
Model positive interpersonal skills like candor, respect, and tolerance.
15. Prioritize work-life harmony.
Establish healthy work-life boundaries for a thriving team. Leave the office on time, address workload issues, and refrain from after-hours emails. Leaders must model and respect these boundaries, promoting a shift toward rest for better performance. Keep workloads manageable to prevent burnout and maintain productivity.
Ensure policies are working in employees’ favor.
Set appropriate boundaries and model positive behaviors.
Use resource planning and capacity planning to manage workload.
Monitor individual capacity to balance workloads across the team.