Team and The Revolving Door

In any team sport, the key to sustained success is managing the revolving door of players. Players come and players go. In business it is the same. If you are leading a team, you are responsible for making sure that the revolving door is geared toward bringing in players who are better than those that are leaving.

Keeping A Good Team

So how do you go about doing this? Whether you are a small business owner, entrepreneur or a business executive all of us know that situations, especially when it comes to employment, are not forever. A good start to managing the revolving door and keeping a good team is to place high value on the good people already on the team.
According to John Maxwell every team has three groups of players. The first is the starters, who directly add value to the organization or who directly influences its course. The second is the bench players, who indirectly add value to the organization or who support the starters. The third group is a core group within the starters that he calls the inner-circle members. Without these people the team would fall apart.

A Good Team Is An Evolving Process

Your job as a self-employed business owner, or corporate manager or executive is to make sure each group is continually developed so that bench players are able to step up to become starters, and starter are able to step up to become inner-circle members.

In my personal business coaching practice I have observed that the business owners and managers who understand the revolving door and how to have it work to their advantage have better and more productive teams.
If you are not sure who the inner circle members are on your team, then try this exercise: Write the names of the people on your team who are starters. Now determine the people you could most easily do without. One by one, check off the names of the people whose loss would hurt the team least if they left. At some point you will end up with a smaller group of people without whom the team would be dead. That’s your inner circle. At this point you can rank the remaining members of the team in order of importance.

Treatment of Team Members Must Match Their Value

Also, this is a good exercise to remind you of the value of the people on the team. And here’s another observation that Maxwell makes. If your treatment of those people doesn’t match their value, your run the risk of losing them and having your revolving door work against you and your team.

Here’s the question for moving your team forward in the small business or the corporate world. Does your treatment of your inner-circle members match their value? When it does your revolving door slows down and you are better able to manage it and your team. And your reputation will become one of a good team leader where people want your door to revolve so they can come in and be part of your team.