Rocketeer Leadership Behavior 1 - Team Builder

It's great that you're an individual high performer. You can amplify your impact by be being a great team builder.

Team Builder.

Our first Leadership Behavior is Team Builder. Here’s the slide from our super-secret internal deck:

If you can’t build a team, then how do you scale? Teams are built of real people, wand whilst many might like to think that it’s easy to separate home and work, at ServiceRocket we consider each Rocketeer as a complete person. So our leaders need to undersatnd this. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t focused on performance, quite the opposite - if we are aware of the state of our teams, we can adjust. Someone who is totally on their game one week, might be off on another and a great leader can see this and adjust.

To get a team moving in the same direction, a leader needs to be able to articulate a consistent vision (Ideally in the same direction as the company! - hey, we’ve all seen the politics that creeps into big companies as they all strive to keep their investors happy.)

The Team Builder Leadership Behavior has the following sub-points:

• Articulates a vision aligned with the Company, Customers and Rocketeer interests

• Continually recruits and builds diverse teams

• Connects deeply with others

• Creates a positive climate that supports Rocketeers doing their best.

• Compassionate

The behavior we’re coaching here is for our leaders to be approachable, show empathy and be able to connect with their team. As they build out their teams, they are seeking out new perspectives and a diverse set of skills on top of the core skills that they need. For us, we make heavy use of KOLBE to help us understand an individual Rocketeers way of thinking in their default mode.

Anti-Behavior: Not a Team Player

We think Anti-Behaviors are a clear way to communicate what we don’t want. And to try and be explicit. In this case, we simply used the inverse of the what makes an ideal team builder.

Our Inspiration

We leveraged this Leadership Behavior from Scaling Leadership by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams along with it’s anti-behavior. The series of books and research by these authors and the underlying Leadership Circle framework is used heavily at our company and linking these together made so much sense. In that body of work it distinguishes between leaders being in the state of high creativity or high reactivity. The anti-behavior logically has a canceling effect on the creative side.

The sub-points were inspired by our Rocketeer managers along with the Leadership Circle. I’ll write more in a future post how we use this leadership framework in our company across the globe in a scalable way.

Some great resources for this Leadership Behavior include*:

• Ideal Team Player

• Mastering Leadership

• Scaling Leadership

• Principles

Why do we have Leadership Behaviors? Isn’t this what Core Values are supposed to do? See my previous post below on ‘When are Core Values not enough?”, but in short Leadership Behaviors give you explicit coachable items to work with your team to help them get better. Telling someone they have fallen on a behavior is much easier to correct and improve, whereas telling someone that they have failed against values is akin to telling them that they’ve been banished from the tribe.

In my opinion, companies need to define these behaviors if they are truly invested in growing their employees to reach their potential. We outline this in our Rocketeer Promise.

*I have some amazon affiliate codes on book links, I may make billions from these and quit my job.

**Over time these posts will be updated with more links, tweaks and changes as we learn more. Nothing is ever final at ServiceRocket, and we don’t like “unveiling” things.