To mould the team, place more emphasis on performance. If your focus is not on performance, then there is no need wasting everybody’s time. In moulding, your team will weigh your tolerance level and they will check your patience too. Obviously, they will check your expert power and they will investigate your passion.
Be deep as a leader. Tap into your gut and heart. Show your followers a lot more of courage in decision-making and integrity in implementing policies, introducing processes, executing strategies, managing issues and handling challenges to demonstrate to them that you are human in showing interest in what they do and in developing their well-being at all times.
Leaders build and mould teams from ground zero, and teams must be prepared to go through the stages. Tuckman makes it simple as summarised by Hughes et al (2015). Teams are formed with an intention to achieve a goal and, within the same intention, to develop and to lead followers to reach their potential. In moulding teams, leaders must be conscious of this: Teams are often made up of people with diverse orientation, from education to work experience, from social backgrounds to age differences, and from gender to different thinking abilities.
Differences set enough tone for team friction. When teams are formed, they storm. Every leader must anticipate this. Good leaders don’t take sides. Good leaders are objective when team issues start springing up. Ahenkorah (2018) mentions that good leaders know that in teamwork there are issues, and with teamwork there are no issues.
A leader should redirect team focus toward the goal every time. This is where leaders introduce policies, standards, ethics and values to ensure that the team norms well. And if a team is able to go through these phases, it is always easier for such a team to perform. When a team is performing, I describe that phase as ‘no mountain is too high to climb and no river is too deep to swim in’. Here, everyone is ready to support each other to succeed.
No one hurts. When a team performs over a long period of time, a leader must introduce mixed models of motivation to keep the team moving. When teams perform, they adjourn. The adjourning stage can be controlled when the right motivation tool is applied. In moulding teams, leaders must apply discipline fairly in dealing with unwanted situations.
Fair discipline is to transfer an unwanted consequence or to remove a wanted consequence, with the likelihood that a certain conduct will not be repeated. In applying discipline fairly, a leader is correcting the unacceptable behaviour and not to attack individuals and personalities. The effective application of the leadership framework is the comprehensive discipline of the situation. Build people to mould a team.
