Making great leaders and teams

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born. 
Leadership is a learned skill! But it is a skill that needs to be continually updated as the business world moves. You also need to know how to build a team so you can achieve great things together.
A team is like coal on fire -- together, they glow; apart, they grow cold. Coming together is a start; keeping together is progress; working together is success.
What separates a great team from a bunch of people who can't work together? A great team needs a good leader. He rallies the team, gives them the big picture and gets them focused towards the goal. He is the cheerleader who motivates the group to work towards success. Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald said: "None of us is more important than the rest of us."
Teams must share information unselfishly. The same information may be put to good use by another team member who is good at seeing relationships. We can't achieve our goals alone. We get a better perspective of a problem when sharing it with others who have different experiences and insights.
Teams provide opportunities for interaction. Although each department in a company is a team, it must also cooperate with other departments in the company. Some departments guard their interests so jealously that they are autonomous regions within a big nation. This works to the detriment of the company.
Teams share glories of success and bear the blame for failures. This ideal helps to cement the idea of working together as one happy family. It creates a sense of belonging and unity.
You must get the right people to form a good team. Selecting a group of people who can work well together is an art. Borrowing a principle from magnetism, opposite poles attract, so try to form a team of people with different skills, talents, and experience. Creative people contribute enormously to the success of a team.
You need a catalyst for every team. In chemistry, a catalyst is a substance that causes or speeds up a reaction without it self being affect. In he reality is that a job is entirely what you make of it.
Modern business demands people with entrepreneurial spirit, positive attitude and leadership skills. Once you are in the company door, they don't care where you went to college, they don't care who your mother is, and they don't care how you look in a suit. They only care about how you perform.
Real leaders challenge the process. They're never happy with things being good enough. They always ask: Is there a better way? They can also articulate and inspire a shared vision that people want to be part of.
Building high performance teams by winning culture
Between plans and reality lie years of habits, customs, unwritten ground rules, and vested interests: the corporate culture. Wisdom is understanding the power of culture and how to get it to work for you, instead of against you, during organizational change.
In the broadest sense, corporate culture refers to the personality of the organization, the shared beliefs, and the written and unwritten policies and procedures that determine the ways in which the organization and its people behave and solve business problems.
Since the current business environment warrants these initiatives, why do they fail?
The answer is clear. Most change initiatives focus on the operational and technical side. What they too often ignore, or, at best, give lip service to, is the human side - the behavioral side of change.
It is easier to decide on change than to get people to change. To truly change the corporation, you need to change the culture.
The failure of many organizational improvement initiatives can generally be traced back to the corporate culture; people resisting change, poor leadership skills, people not knowing how to work together, or employees not understanding the new direction.
A strong culture is a system of informal rules that spells out how people are to behave most of the time. By knowing what exactly is expected of them, employees will waste little time in deciding how to act in a given situation.
In a weak culture, on the other hand, employees waste a good of time just trying to figure out what they should do and how they should do it.
Never jump right to action, without understanding, without disciplined thought, and without first getting the right people on the bus. Do not sell the future, to compensate for lack of results.
But if we keep pushing in the right direction, we will eventually hit breakthrough. It might not happen today, or tomorrow, or next week. It might not even happen next year. But it will happen.