How to Turn Passion Into PurposeSample

It is one thing to build a team; it is another challenge altogether to make that team work. A healthy team requires its members to appreciate what every other team member has to offer. Members need to appreciate their own talents while simultaneously having the humility to use those talents in service of the best interests of the team. They also need to be willing to have hard conversations when needed and to be accountable to one another.

To work in harmony, team members have to resist the temptation to play to the crowd. Recognition and applause may stoke the ego, but they are never as satisfying as shared wins. But you can’t have shared wins if you are possessive about the work you are doing and unwilling to invite other people into it. One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned again and again over the years is the power of delegation and shared responsibility.

As leaders, we may sometimes think that we have to own both the problem and the solution ourselves, that we have to work harder than anyone and prove ourselves worthy of leading by being the best. While it is important to set the example by working hard and striving every day for excellence, our job as leaders is not to prove to our team that we are the best, but to help our team improve, so that we can all excel together. No one of us are the best at everything; that’s impossible. We need each other and the unique gifts and strengths that others have, which are different from our own.

Identifying our own weaknesses or challenges as leaders is also key, because it is precisely in the areas where we fall short that we can recruit others who shine. By doing the difficult daily work of figuring out how to understand one another, collaborate, and lean in to our individual roles on our team, we can push forward to victory.