A highly effective group or team is built when the individuals involved are all playing to their own strengths. All too often the right person has wrong duties.
In building a team around you – whether personally or professionally – you must strive to allow people to do what they do best. You need to take time to place them in the correct position in the jigsaw of your route to success. When a piece doesn’t fit and there is a mismatch in a person’s skills and role, they will underperform. There’s also a chance that they’ll become demotivated, which will add to the problem.
Great care must be taken to ensure you don’t shoehorn people into situations and roles that don’t align with their capability. This will invariably lead to discontent and disconnection with the team’s – and, therefore, of course, your – overall purpose. You should seek alignment between a person’s passion and their ability, with the aims and objectives of the group.
The reality is that while people may be good at specific tasks, they may fall short on others. Or perhaps as the ambitions and aspirations of a group or organisation grow, those of an individual may change as their own priorities may shift. This can often result in a person either outgrowing a position or, in ambitious environments, not being able to keep up. This requires either redeployment of an individual or supporting them in gaining the necessary new skills.
To make sure you’re making the right decisions with respect to the people who are crucial to your mission, you must remain connected to their emotional, personal and professional needs. By doing so, you’ll become hard wired into individual and team dynamics – it will also help you to judge and decide what, if any, changes are needed.