Assembling a Dream Team: 2 Big Obstacles
In those rare moments of calm, found between sessions of pulling their hair out and banging their heads against a wall... leaders and managers sometimes fantasize about having a “Dream Team.”
We could define this as a team with the right talent, initiative and desire to get stuff done and move forward without drama.
Like baking a cake or assembling a shelf from IKEA, building a dream team sounds fairly easy on paper.
There are three simple ingredients. Just hire people who are...
(1) Smarter than you. You want people who can do specific tasks better than you could... otherwise you might as well do them yourself.
(2) High-octane. You need energetic people who are willing and able to tackle big issues.
(3) Diverse. You want people with different perspectives, to ensure your team has the creativity to solve big problems.
Now, in an ideal world I’d end the blog post here and you’d implement this list perfectly. You would then send me a “thank you for the awesome results” note, stapled to a big fat check.
Unfortunately (for me), we don’t live in this “ideal world”… so I’ll need to continue.
The basic ingredients for creating a dream team really are this simple, but there are two obstacles often preventing it from becoming a reality.
The first is the “Me Factor.”
There’s how leaders and managers should operate, based on books and courses on How To Be The Perfect Leader… and then there’s what actually happens in the real world, about three nanoseconds after they finish the course.
For example, some managers might be reluctant to hire people smarter than themselves, because this would make the manager… well, replaceable.
Leaders might not want to deal with high-energy people who have big ideas, especially if they conflict with the leader’s own big ideas.
Sometimes they’d rather hire people who will just nod in agreement and say something like, “Yes, your idea to literally carpet-bomb Los Angeles with our branded bowling balls is brilliant. I wish I’d thought of it.”
Of course, if you’re a leader or manager, the only person in control of this factor is you.
The second obstacle to creating a “dream team” is what we might call the “Everyone Else Factor.”
Smart, high-octane people tend to have strong opinions, which means they’re not always going to agree with you or one another. This can make it hard to get buy-in.
Diverse team members may come from different backgrounds, so they won’t always see things the same way. This can threaten the alignment of your team.
Now, this is the first in a series of blog posts about “How To Create A Dream Team.”
I’ve already given you the three key ingredients: hire a group of people who are (1) diverse, (2) high-octane, and (3) who can do specific tasks better than you.
I’ve also shown you the two big obstacles:
(1) The “Me Factor”... which is really the you factor. How willing are you to hire people who are capable of doing some things better than you, and who will push back on your “Bowling Balls Over California” ideas?
(2) The “Everyone Else Factor”… which is the reality that a diverse, smart and high-octane team can be “a bit of a nightmare,” for leaders who don’t know how to handle this.
While the “Me Factor” does exist, I actually find it’s pretty rare. The bigger challenge is the “Everyone Else Factor.” The question is: how can you bring together a bunch of bright, motivated and opinionated people… in a way that produces synergy, productivity and all the other good management buzzwords?
Over the coming blog posts I’ll share leadership strategies I’ve used in real workplaces, to help create dream teams that really do lift and pull together. Stay tuned.
