How to Build a Team that Creates Better Business Outcomes

Having a diverse team results in a challenge to the status quo and creates new ideas and the ability to accomplish more.

You may be tempted to build a homogeneous team in your weight loss practice – meaning hire a lot of the same type people. Let’s face it, sometimes you like to be around people that you have things in common with. However, I encourage you to resist this because when you have the same types of person on your team with similar talents, you can build a homogeneous viewpoint. This contributes to a tendency towards maintaining the status quo. 

Not only is diversity important from a cultural perspective, it benefits you greatly from a business perspective.  When you build a diverse team, you include people with differing ideas, different personalities and different experiences.  This actually results in a challenge to the status quo and often accelerates ideas and team synergy.

Varied talents and viewpoints can create polarizing instigators on your team.  Instigators may have a negative connotation, but it’s also somebody who will challenge what’s going on in a meeting or what the ‘groupthink’ might be. I have a number of polarizing instigators on my team.  You might think its conflict that occurs, but it is most often a great deal of mutual respect among us for our varied ideas. Most discussions end up advancing us to consider new and different ideas that we wouldn’t have thought of as a similar homogeneous group.

I have team meeting most Monday mornings with my managers. I have a retail & sales manager, a fitness & education manager and my office manager. Like you, I’m right in the trenches and we meet on Monday mornings, we review what was accomplished the previous week, what are our goals for this week and where we may need assistance. It’s interesting because everyone has a different personality and everyone has a different viewpoint.  We have such mutual respect for each other that it’s easy to share our opinions and then piggyback on everyone’s ideas to come up with something really fabulous.

I believe, this has contributed to the success we experience today as well as created a way to include the entire team when it comes to implementation of new ideas and mapping out the ‘nitty gritty’.

For example, when I have a specific goal or outcome that I want to accomplish, I will typically bring up the goal to my managers.  As a group we talk about it and share ideas.  Sometimes, we may even decide it is not something worth pursuing. If the idea is a ‘go’, we come up with synergistic ideas. In fact, if you were a fly on the wall during one of these discussions, you might think, ‘Oh gosh, is this a little bit of a conflict?’, but it’s really not. It’s our way of challenging each other, challenging our viewpoint and accepting that we all have different viewpoints. Then we take the best of the best to determine a plan of action. Even if something doesn’t go as great as we might have thought it would, then this discussion generally provides us with a plethora of backup ideas we can use as we get together to regroup.  Just like you, we are always looking for ways to improve.

I encourage you as you’re hiring new team members and putting people together in different planning groups, make sure that you don’t have one homogeneous group. Make sure that you have some polarizing instigators in the group to shake things up and get your organization to a higher level.  This is far better than experiencing groupthink or simply doing things the way they have always been done before because that is easier and more comfortable.

While not easy, I encourage you to get out of your comfort zone. If you want to schedule a complementary, no pressure, just focus on YOU call with me, please schedule some time on my calendar by clicking here.  I look forward to talking with you soon!