By WALE AKINYEMI

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No company or organisation can perform better than its team. A company is as great as the team. Strong teams comprise individuals with diverse skill sets that complement one another.

Each member brings a unique set of talents and expertise to the table, creating a collective intelligence greater than the sum of its parts. A well-rounded team can tackle a variety of challenges, ensuring adaptability and resilience in a dynamic business landscape.

There is a fundamental question that every strong team has been able to answer: What’s in it for me? Studies and research show that people want to find meaning —a sense of importance, a sense of impact and a sense of value— at work. When they do, you will get the best from any collection of people.

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Strong teams thrive from the intellectual prowess of their members, but that is but a small percentage of what makes them strong. The ability to temper brilliance with humility is one of the key factors that make great team players.

Nothing succeeds like a team that is open to cross-pollination of ideas. In fact, one way of measuring the communication level of teams is to evaluate the democratisation of ideas. The ability to make everyone own a part of a decision is the stuff that makes great leadership. Give each member an opportunity to contribute something—a word, an idea, and when they do, celebrate it and make them feel like a part of the success. This is the most effective answer to the question, ‘what’s in it for me.’

This places emotional intelligence right at the top of attributes that a leader needs to bring out the best in the team. A heterogeneous team brings a wealth of ideas, enriching the decision-making process and fostering innovation.

History is littered with stories of companies that thrived through building great teams and those that ran aground because there was no cross-pollination of ideas.

Google has what is called «20 percent Time.» This initiative allows Google employees to spend up to 20 percent of their workweek on projects or ideas that personally interest them and may contribute to the company’s goals. It’s a form of structured innovation time, designed to encourage creativity, foster entrepreneurial spirit, and drive innovation within the company.

Read: AKINYEMI: Organisations must adapt and change with the times or perish

Some of Google’s most successful products, like Gmail and Google News, have originated from employees’ 20 percent Time projects.
LinkedIn has an initiative called «InCubator,» which allows employees to take up to three months to work on a project of their choice. The programme aims to foster innovation and intrapreneurship within the company.

3M is famous for its longstanding policy known as the «15 percent Rule,» where employees are encouraged to spend up to 15 percent of their time on projects outside their regular job responsibilities. The Post-it Note, a widely used adhesive note, is one of the products of this practice.

WhatsApp was founded by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both of whom were former employees of Yahoo. They left Yahoo in 2007, and WhatsApp was officially launched in 2009. The similarities between the interface of WhatsApp and the dead Yahoo Messenger have sparked speculations that Yahoo did not give room for a lot of personal innovation. If this is true, then they paid the supreme price because Yahoo Messenger is no more today while WhatsApp is the world’s short messaging leader.

Think of this, if you do not create space for liberal thought and innovation among your team, they will keep looking for that space, and when they find it, it might just be the very thing that will put you out of business.

Wale Akinyemi is the founder of The Street University. Email [email protected]