Executive View: A team can spell success, or disaster. You choose.

Employees are rarely hired as a team, so effective leaders must ensure they gel together and understand their purpose, says Dr William Holden, chairman of Sewells, in his latest installment of an exclusive series with AM-online, where  provides his monthly Executive View sharing insights into people and performance management to help automotive retail leaders to inspire, motivate and guide their dealership teams more effectively.

Like most people, we’ve always been fascinated by the link between the level of teamwork and performance. Now, it’s more important than ever – whether that’s for the team in the office/showroom or working from home – or both!

So, how does the right team become a single, efficient, almost unstoppable unit with each person willingly playing their full part, in achieving, and exceeding, all the collective business objectives?

For us, at Sewells, we know that teamwork is one of the make-or-break factors in any business’s success.

And in most companies, it is one of the biggest opportunities for significant improvements in performance, without it costing a fortune. And here’s why…

The members of a team are usually not recruited as a team. They are a diverse set of individuals, all hired for their own skills, and all bringing their own experience and talents, including beliefs, attitudes, habits and work ethic.

Then, they are brought together, or thrown together, and expected to “bond” as an effective high performing unit. But that kind of approach very rarely works in practice.

They need to rally behind, and fully buy into, an evocative team purpose i.e. “we’re the only choice our customers want to make”. And, if they’re not 100% committed to it then no amount of paintball-type teambuilding days will fill in or repair the cracks. (paper over them for a few days, maybe … but not remove them)

It takes time, know-how and concerted effort to form a genuine, trusting, unified, hugely effective and sustainably winning team.

So, let’s take this back to your organisation. Do you have winning, focused high-performing teams in all the places you need them?

• Do you have a team purpose they all 100% buy into?
• Do they have the right team dynamics? With no politics, turf wars, hurtful trading of insults or corporate psychopaths?
• Are you leading / managing / inspiring them face to face or remotely and brilliantly, all the time?
• Are they producing the results you and they want and deserve … day in day, day out?
• Do they communicate effectively with each other and, with whomever else needs to be kept in the loop?
• Do you recruit the right people with the right attitudes and mindsets in the first place who deserve to be part of your winning team?
• Do you have the winning teams everywhere in your organisation that you can totally rely on?

If you’ve answered “no” to any of the above questions, you probably need to admit to yourself that there’s considerable room for improvement before they become a winning team. Which means, you won’t be getting optimal results and performance. 

Always remember, if the team don’t stand for something, they’ll fall for anything.