How Can You Get Individual Superstars With Strong Personalities to Work Together?

Truth be told, any manager can create an A-team. However, it’s not always a piece of cake to gather aces and put them on their best places and get them to work altogether. Superstars tend to have strong personalities and have a type A personality: driven and assertive.

Most managers are then faced with the question on how to combine their talents, skills, and brains for one project and lead them to work harmoniously.

Vince Lombardi believes that the secret to building a team of superstars is to motivate them to work towards a common goal. But even if we’re not talking about sports, the same motivation is quintessential in any team, especially in the workplace.

In the Team Effectiveness Review led by Elaine Yew at Egon Zehnder during the late 90s, she discussed the six critical team competencies that can make an A-team thrive.

Let’s explore five of these six ingredients that make individual superstars work great with a team.

BalanceIt’s not enough that the team understands the importance of diversity of skills and strengths. They should be also willing to incorporate them. Dan of The Leadership Freak noted about 13 reasons why teams lose momentum and one of them is dominant members who cause others to feel insignificant.

As the leader, you are responsible to help your members understand each other’s skills and strengths despite the fact that superstars tend to be “me-focused”. By identifying each superstar’s motivation, you can work around how to best motivate and inspire them to work with others without feeling the need to be always be on the spotlight.

Have your team take the Myers Brigg Test to understand their personalities better and how they operate with other people. You can also that test to create teams that has a good mix of personalities that can work well together. Some personalities are suited better for leadership roles while some are better in keeping group cohesiveness. It will also be also hard if the team has too many introverts or too many extroverts. By having a diverse mix of personalities, they can complement each other and draw strength from.

EnergyAn ambitious team thinks about long-term momentum at a high level. Superstars are naturally driven individuals who always have the thirst for victory and excellence and each member’s enthusiasm would easily rub off on others.

A powerful tool your organization can tap is the Strengthsfinder test. Some people have the Achiever Strength which means they have a great deal of stamina and take great satisfaction from being busy and productive. By having someone in the team with the strength of Maximizer, the team can reach great heights as they are driven to produce superb results.

Alignment

Do your team members understand the larger team purpose? If not, you may want to direct all their efforts on one central objective. It’s time to leverage their thinking. TribeHR Staff said businesses are most successful when employees’ personal goals are aligned with that of corporate goals. Yes, while each member may have personal goals and priorities, team leaders should aim to make the business thrive and ensure that each team player’s goal aligns with that of company’s. Each team should have a member that seeks to refocus members who gets distracted from the team goal and selfishly focuses on their own goals. Teams that think win-win (i.e. if the team wins, they personally win) will perform well in every project.

Resilience

Author Margaret Heffernan said that social capitals make a group resilient. By that, she means trust, knowledge, reciprocity, and shared norms. If you are a team leader, it helps to show your team the outcome of their collected efforts. Writer Glenn Llopis said one of the ways to inspire a team is to make them feel that their hard work makes a difference beyond just profitability. Their efforts should be recognized and it should not just be in terms of monetary terms but also perhaps in promotion prospects and other incentives that matter to them.

Stress Management

One of the biggest challenges to teams is how to deal with pressure not only individually, but also as a team. You may encourage your team to try a few quirky de-stress hacks such as photography contest activities or simply employee’s day out. After a super-busy week, your team deserves relaxing and reenergizing activities to keep them motivated and happy at work. Creativity is boosted when a team has enough rest and recreation.

Having great individuals work together as a team is a great opportunity and a challenge to focus on the over-all and high level goals. By focusing on the over-all objectives, one can minimize the potential clashes within the team and make the best use of individual talents, skills and take advantage of the adversity of the group.