What makes the difference between a well-organized team and a chaotic one? How can you ensure each team member thrives in their role?
Leaders who know how to organize a team effectively can transform workplace dynamics and boost productivity. In The Way of the Shepherd, Kevin Leman and William Pentak share practical strategies for clarifying roles, highlighting their importance, and matching employees to positions that suit them best.
Keep reading to discover how to organize a team using time-tested principles that create harmony and maximize each person’s potential.
Organizing a Team
Leman and Pentak argue that, in addition to building trust and relationships with their employees, every effective leader puts in the necessary time and effort to organize their team for efficient coordination and productivity. We’ll discuss how to organize a team: clarify roles, infuse them with importance, and match the right worker to their role.
#1: Clarify the Boundaries of Each Role
Leman and Pentak advise you to create clear boundaries for each role. By clearly defining roles and responsibilities, employees have a precise understanding of their duties and how they fit into the larger organizational structure.
However, the authors also stress the importance of granting team members autonomy within their roles. Granting autonomy within these defined boundaries empowers employees to make decisions and take initiative in their areas of responsibility. Striking a balance between these goals is part of your task as a leader. For example, you might delineate responsibilities so that there’s no overlap between roles, but then give workers freedom in how they carry out those responsibilities. This is analogous to how a shepherd keeps their flock within a strong fence but gives each sheep freedom to roam around within it.
(Shortform note: Clarifying roles and granting autonomy both play a role in decreasing employee stress. Role ambiguity—the perception that workers don’t know where their responsibilities begin and end—has been linked to increased levels of stress, burnout, and even depression. Similarly, micromanagement—which deprives workers of their autonomy, has also been linked to higher levels of perceived stress and demoralization among employees.)
#2: Clarify the Value of Each Role
Leman and Pentak assert that effective leaders organize their teams by taking the time to clarify how each role contributes to the company mission. By explicitly connecting individual roles to the broader organizational goals, you ensure that every employee understands their unique contribution to the company’s success. This fosters a deeper connection to the organization while providing employees with motivation and commitment. This also creates a sense of importance for each role, which prevents friction that might arise from jealousy between employees who feel slighted if they perceive their role as unimportant.
(Shortform note: In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber elaborates on how workers will disengage if they perceive their work as unimportant. He explains that deep down, most people want to make a meaningful contribution to society. If they perceive their role as falling short in this regard, people feel a loss of agency and dignity. They lose a sense of agency because they believe they aren’t making anything happen, and they experience this as an indignity because they feel devalued and degraded by not being allowed to contribute. Therefore, you can have a much more engaged workforce if everyone understands the purpose and importance of their role.)
#3: Place Your Workers in the Right Roles for Them
Leman and Pentak assert that once you establish the purpose, boundaries, and importance of each role, you must put in the time and effort to carefully match employees to their proper roles. They argue that effective leaders should strive to understand their team members’ unique abilities, passions, and personalities to ensure optimal job placement.
(Shortform note: Data analytics and artificial intelligence may be changing the way employees are matched to their roles. The emerging HR practice of “hyper-personalization” tracks data on employee performance, preferences, and feedback to curate tailored career development paths, learning opportunities, and even wellness initiatives based on insights into each employee’s unique profile.)
To identify the role that best suits each employee, Leman and Pentak propose evaluating them across four key qualities: mindset, abilities, passions, and disposition.
Quality 1) Mindset
Mindset refers to the set of attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that shape how an individual thinks about themselves, their abilities, and the world around them. Leman and Pentak argue that mindset is the most important attribute to make or break a candidate when hiring, and they encourage leaders to look for workers with a positive outlook, an ability to get along with the team, and the ability to grow and learn from their mistakes.
Quality 2) Abilities
This quality focuses on an employee’s skills and talents. Teams function best when each employee can apply their individual capacities to their role. For example, a team member with strong analytical abilities might excel in a data-driven role, while someone with excellent interpersonal skills could thrive in a customer-facing position.
Quality 3) Passions
Passions are what motivate and excite an employee. Workers will achieve the most when they’re passionate and excited about their work. A passionate writer, for example, might be best suited for content creation roles, while someone passionate about problem-solving could excel in project management.
Quality 4) Disposition
Disposition encompasses an employee’s natural traits and preferences. These could include things like a preference for working alone or with others, for high-pressure or low-pressure projects, or for customer-facing or back-end roles. You’ll get the best work out of your employees if they’re satisfied in their position and consider it a good fit for their preferences. For example, an extrovert might flourish in a sales role, while a detail-oriented introvert could be more effective in a research or quality assurance position.
| How Each of These Four Qualities Relate to “Flow States” By matching employees with the right role based on these four characteristics, you may be able to help employees achieve a state of flow in their work. In this commentary, we’ll define what “flow” is, explain how it contributes to work performance, and discuss the role of each of these four qualities in achieving a flow state. In Flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains that flow states are peak experiences where someone becomes utterly immersed in a task. Time slows down, self-conscious anxiety drifts away, and the work feels almost effortless. This is what high-performing artists or athletes may refer to as “being in the zone.” Studies have shown a clear link between flow states and high performance. Thus, you can get better performance from your workers by setting them up to achieve a state of flow in their work. Finding the best fit for your workers along all four qualities improves their chance of achieving higher flow. 1) Mindset: An employee’s mindset plays an important role in achieving flow—especially their level of confidence. One study assessed athletes’ levels of confidence before a match and found it to be a significant predictor of flow states. Thus, connecting workers to roles where they’ll be confident in their tasks can improve their performance. 2) Abilities: In Hyperfocus, Chris Bailey explains that to maintain a state of flow, your skills need to be appropriately matched to the task. Too easy a task will result in boredom, while too difficult a task will result in frustration. By finding this Goldilocks zone for each of your employees, you can help them reach optimal levels of flow. 3) Passions: Flow states are intrinsically rewarding. That is, the process of doing the activity provides the emotional reward, more so than anything gained through the activity, like money or prestige. By understanding your employees’ passions and motivations, you’ll be better able to connect them to roles that they find intrinsically rewarding. 4) Disposition: According to Csikszentmihalyi, people are better equipped to enter a flow state when they feel a sense of control over their experience. That is, when they understand the risks involved and trust their ability to manage those risks. If someone is a bad personality fit for their role—an introvert forced to do customer service, for example—they may lose the feeling of control required for flow. |
