Learning about Your Team

I ran across an interesting article from John Maxwell about teams and team leadership. He noted that in all his years of studying leadership and evaluating leaders, he stumbled across an amazing leadership shortcoming. He said,

Leaders will manage a team, work with the same individuals every day, yet hardly know anything about their people! These leaders have never prioritized acquainting themselves with the dreams, thoughts, hopes, opinions, and values of those they lead.

Maxwell suggests a set of three simple questions to help leaders “read” their people.

The best leaders are readers of people; they possess an intuitive ability to understand others by discerning how they feel and by recognizing what they sense.

To develop this ability, Maxwell suggests that leaders ask these three questions about their people’s passions. As they do so, they will build stronger missional teams.

1. What do you dream about?
A person’s dreams are powerful revealers of passion. When a person starts to talk about their dreams, their eyes brighten, their face glows, and you can feel the excitement in their words.

2. What do you cry about?
Passion can be uncovered by peering into the hurts deep inside a human soul. The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force. When listening to a story of grief, you hear a voice thick with emotion, you see watery eyes flooded with feeling, and in that moment you glimpse the intense connections between a person’s deepest pain and their greatest passion.

3. What makes you happy?
Enjoyment is an incredible energizer to the human spirit. When a person operates in an area of pleasure, they are apt to be brimming with life and exuding passion.

Maxwell maintains that once you’ve uncovered a person’s dreams, hurts, and joys, you’ve discovered the central dimensions of their life. By asking questions that are both positive (what makes you happy) and negative (what makes you cry), a leader can find the opposite feelings and emotions which reveal the true inner self.

Maxwell suggests the following exercise to ingrain this simple method of “learning about your team.”

1. Ask yourself and answer the three previous questions. In doing so, you’ll enhance your self-awareness.

2. Share your answers with your team to allow them to learn about you.

3. Ask your team to answer the questions to encourage their self-discovery.

4. Ask your team to share their answers with one another. This practice will bring team members closer together.

Maxwell suggests some other questions to add to your leadership toolbox. Ask your team members:

What is your biggest asset?
What is your biggest liability?
What do you most like from others?
What do you least like from others?
What is the best thing to have?
What is the worst thing to not have?