BEWARE - Are You the Weakest Link on Your Team?

This year I have worked hard to build a strong team of Leaders at my work. Growing a team of people to becoming “Their Best” is what drives and motivates me, everyday.

Usually, the results are enough to keep your team motivated, and encouraged. All of the members don’t need to see personal results, sometimes team results or positive results of another team member can be enough to keep growing themselves or challenging each other.

But what do you do when the results aren’t there? or you, as the Leader, start to feel demotivated? Check out some previous tips to ensure that you, THE LEADER, are ALWAYS on your Game:

• How to Get Started?
• How you should look at your Job.
• Are You a Servant Leader?
• How to ALWAYS get a YES from your Boss.
• Should I STAY or Should I GO?
• Are You a Scary Manager?
• Do You Make Work Harder by not Managing Your Boss?
• Leadership 101 - Seek First to UNDERSTAND…
• What’s a Leader to do when THEY have the BLAHs?
• 5 Reasons Why You Should Treat Your Employees Like Dogs
• Ever Feel like things will NEVER change?

So this year was a good year, but the REAL question is, “How do we, as a team, continue to improve year over year”? Before I answer this, let me tell you a funny story about helping your Boss put things into perspective.

It all started with a simple lock, just like this one.

As I remember the story, I heard my General Manager (I was a Director of Housekeeping at a hotel at the time), call me on the two way radio… “You need to come meet me at the Store Room in the East Tower” (it was not really a store room but what I called the ‘Museum’). You see it was 5 Star hotel and when we stored things in the storeroom, we weren’t talking about old mop buckets and busted up computers etc… but hundreds of items from $30,000 pieces of artwork to antique chairs, or original statues etc… you get the picture. “Come up here right away, I need to see you” was the call… It sounded SO urgent so I dropped everything to respond. When I got there, I was frustrated to find that he only wanted to SHOW OFF his new IMPERVIOUS PADLOCK. As I was burning inside, frustrated that my idiot Boss just called me away from SERIOUS work; I began to ponder all the FACTS he was throwing at me:

• This lock cost me…(can’t remember exactly but it was definately WAY TOO MUCH)
• It’s Bullet Proof, at any distance (blah blah blah)
• Same lock they used at Fort Knox…(oh sure)
• I think it weighed like 8 lbs or something (it WAS Big, I’ll give him that)

All I remember is that he went ON and ON… like this was his FIRSTBORN. Telling me how this will be the perfect solution to protecting all our valuables in “The Museum”. I was thinking frantically how I could get out of this scenario and what I could do to bring my Boss ‘Back to Reality’, when just then my Chief Engineer walked up to see what all the ‘hub bub’ was on the radio. Then it came to me, Find The Weakest Link…

I asked my Chief for his tin snips from his tool belt and with two quick snips I cut the ‘$2.00 hasp’ holding the expensive lock and all 8 lbs came crashing to the floor (I was lucky it did not break the marble floor, that was not the impact I was trying to make) saying, “that is what I think of your Lock”, as I walked away…

You may think I purposefully tried to embarrass my boss (and maybe I did) but I did ask my Chief to see if he could remedy that for me and he said yes as he tried to keep from laughing out loud at the scene.

In order to continually grow a strong team, you need to continually find the ‘weakest link’ and improve it or replace it. Help your team find and correct the weakest links themselves, then your ready to move on to other opportunities. With these newly developed skills and perspective, they will be UNSTOPABLE.

When you’re NO LONGER NEEDED, consider it a JOB WELL DONE and leave with Pride.

Now Go Out There and find another opportunity to add value to.

Good Luck, and may this year be another good one for you as well. Thank you to Darren Rowse for the topic + group writing project.