Leadership - Teamwork

Teamwork - "cooperation" or "solidarity"

All leaders need teamwork in the sense of cooperation. Very few organizations can prosper or survive long term without cooperation. Many techniques have been developed to improve workplace cooperation.

“Solidarity” - - - Now there is a strong and difficult word. Leaders should strive for solidarity of purpose to optimally achieve sustained results over time.
Athletic coaching is a great place to demonstrate examples of poor, good, and outstanding leadership. The principals of leadership observed in sports apply to all organizations.

Take Coach Tom Izzo and the Spartans of Michigan State.

As a Michigan State graduate, the 2008/2009 season was personally gratifying and successful. Fellow alumni and I are already looking forward to next year after losing to North Carolina in the finals. The success of the Spartans under Coach Izzo has been outstanding. Five Final Fours, every four year player has made the championship weekend. This success comes from a football school in a football conference.

Although I have not had the pleasure of meeting Coach Izzo in person there is little doubt he possesses many strong leadership traits: setting a vision to be a perennial basketball powerhouse, innovating in defensive strategies, setting and monitoring goals, selecting players that fit his team model, and practicing hard to meet aggressive performance standards. All those leadership qualities are no doubt part of the reason for MSU success.

The leadership trait that differentiates MSU basketball and their coach is teamwork – not in the sense of cooperation, but in “solidarity”.

Why do so few leaders possess the ability to bring diverse talents, skills and personalities together in a stressful operating environment consistently over the years time and again?

“Solidarity” is the difficult side of team work. People need to:
• Understand the vision and goals of team
• Understand everyone has their individual role.
• Care about and support each other.
• Respect each other’s role.
• Work hard for a common cause.
• Put personal ambitions aside.

As a leader, one of your most important skills is to promote solidarity within your organization through the development of a strong team culture that produces success today, allows improvement for tomorrow, and achieves the vision in the long term.

Eliminate distractions (waste) to the group that are non-productive in achieving the goals. Foster a positive environment and deal directly with distractions that affect the team solidarity.

Provide an atmosphere to encourage behaviors consistent with solidarity such as group recognition and reward, consistency of discipline and correction of individual errors to maintain self esteem while changing the underperforming behavior. Provide a culture of continuous improvement where the status quo is not good enough and team members understand the need to become better through hard work.

Motivate the team members to believe in each other and the team goals. Motivate them to believe the team and organization are the keys to success on the court or career, not individual glory. Individual glory comes when the team and organization consistently win.

Develop an organizational culture where all levels of team members and decision makers understand and buy into the philosophy. The team welcomes and embraces change and respects each other’s contributions.

Envision a culture of solidarity that fosters sustained excellence with continuous improvement punctuated by leaps of success:

Deal directly, fairly and openly with distractions; embrace the positive team environment (Eliminate)

Encourages a team culture of continuous improvement and innovation (Provide)

Empowers the team members to take support roles for the good of the team and dampen the star power of a few; glory will come with winning (Motivate)

Promotes the generation of new ideas where the team adopts innovations that improve the team performance (Develop)

Deploy a culture where “all for one and one for all” is the solidarity of the group and they speak of “family”. (Envision)

My final thought- MSU will continue their success for years to come as long as their teamwork is based on “solidarity” not just cooperation. GO GREEN, GO WHITE!