Lead Any Team to Win

Consistently winning teams share nine specific practices.   

You’ve heard it many times: A World Series MVP brags about his winning team, and so does the CEO whose company just had its best year. They all say, “It couldn’t have happened without the great team I have around me.” But how do these organizations routinely recruit, hire and develop the right people with diverse but complementary talents to form a consistently winning team?

The leaders of great teams also must manage big personalities despite their inevitable conflicts, secure high-level performances, and maintain the team’s momentum and quest for improvement even as people come and go. Such leaders consistently follow nine basic practices:

1. “Heed your channel capacity” – Set limits. Don’t overload your team.

Channel capacity is “the limited biological bandwidth of the human brain.” Recognizing your team’s capacity requires asking how much new information it can receive, absorb and transmit over time. Maintaining a reasonable team load includes not trying to change too much too fast. Overload is tempting: you see what...