How to Keep Your Team in Step … But Not in Lockstep

A well-oiled team develops a sort of cadence. Everyone marches together, wearing the same uniform, moving toward a common destination.

But one could argue that an even stronger team accommodates those who march to a slightly different beat. After all, you’ve purposely assembled a team of individuals with unique skills and experience. Those differences create strength, resolve, and resilience. Treating a team as a unit without honoring the individual members probably won’t produce the results you need.

As a leader, you are responsible for keeping your team in the right direction. As a great leader, you will figure out how to do that while using its offbeat members to advantage. Here’s how you can.

1. Balance Individual and Team Goals

Teams are the sum of their members, and individuals have personal and professional goals of their own. Those who set more ambitious goals, such as earning a promotion or a bonus, may be more productive than others. Although your goal is to encourage productivity from every member, certain high fliers may be producing an outsize percentage of the results.

That doesn’t mean you should slow down your best performers so they’re in lockstep with the rest of the team. Reward them for their ambition and follow-through, and you might find the others stepping up.

What’s important is that everyone, regardless of individual goals, fully understands the ultimate team and overarching company goals. Moreover, members must know how what they do, as individuals and as a team, contributes to achieving those goals. In other words, you need to practice strategic alignment.

Align your team’s purpose with company goals, and it will meet its objectives with greater consistency. In the process, you’ll be encouraging team members to line up their individual goals with the company’s. You don’t need a team that operates in lockstep. You need a team that knows where it’s headed and why the work of everyone is required to get there.

2. Foster Both Autonomy and Collaboration

Some leaders make the mistake of believing that autonomy and collaboration among team members are mutually exclusive. The fact is that the combination of the two may be the key to increasing productivity and removing barriers to success.

Apply the theory of self-determination. This theory holds that people are more motivated, engaged, persistent, creative, and high-performing when they feel a sense of autonomy. It’s easy to see, then, that fostering autonomy among your team members is a smart leadership move.

Of course, a team won’t be productive if members are merely doing their own thing. The whole purpose of creating a team with diverse skills and experience is to delegate roles accordingly. And because it will take all team members to achieve goals, they will have to collaborate with one another.

If you want to build a productive team, you must allow members some autonomy in their roles. That will boost their individual productivity. However, as they work toward a collective goal, they’ll need to collaborate — another productivity booster. It’s a win-win for everybody involved.

3. Choose Diversity

If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, then diversity can be mind-blowing. The whole diversity, equity, and inclusion concept has become a political punching bag these days. But it’s a good idea to take a broader view of what diversity is and recognize its value.

Diversity involves characteristics of birth, such as race and gender. It involves circumstances that shape an individual, including education, socioeconomic status, and religion. Then, there are factors in the workplace, like seniority, position, and work experience. Finally, there is the worldview element, shaped by cultural norms, beliefs, political affiliations, and more.

Diversity is, in fact, diverse. The combinations that could apply to your team members are virtually endless. What is constant, though, is that diverse teams are more productive, more engaged, and more driven than homogenous ones.

If you want a highly effective team, assemble a group of team players with diverse perspectives. Do so even if your company has kicked its DEI commitment to the curb. Respecting diversity and using it to your advantage involves so much more than traditional DEI anyway.

4. Embrace Flexibility

You recruit a diverse team and give members the opportunity to pursue individual goals and work with autonomy. In such a scenario, rigid leadership will simply not work. You need to not just be flexible, but to embrace flexibility.

Being flexible means that you are willing to change your leadership style with the ebb and flow of your team. You must interact openly with members to solve problems, develop new ideas, and push the envelope. You’ll need to stop looking around at what the rest of the company is doing and try new things.

Of course, you should stay the course with strategies that have proven effective in meeting business goals. But be ready to welcome innovative adjustments when opportunities arise. There’s always room for improvement, and your team members may have some great ideas about building better mousetraps.

Remember that your team is watching, so how you react to creative solutions is important. If you’re resistant to change, team members will be as well. If you’re open to it, they will also engage with confidence.

Different Steps Toward a Shared Destination

If individuals on teams are in lockstep, you’re missing out on strategies that capitalize on their differences. Those are the strategies that can yield greater productivity and goal achievement. Remember that not being in lockstep isn’t a misstep — it’s a confident march toward success.