To prepare for Conversation 1, write down the names of the people on your team.  Now, list everything you know about each person—beyond the team function he or she serves. Do you know anything about their family? How about previous companies they’ve worked for? Can you list any successes they may have had or failures they’ve endured? Do you know anything at all about their personal and professional hopes, needs, dreams and aspirations for the future? Assess how much you know or don’t know about each as a human being. The less you know, the more tenuous your trust and connection is with that person.

Each day for the next week, connect with as many people on your team as possible through a medium other than email; video conferencing is the best alternative to an in-person meeting, but you could use the phone too. And instead of getting right down to business, spend some time checking in on a personal level with the goal of learning as much as you can about who this person is and what makes him or her tick.

As uncomfortable as this might be at first, ask each person to share with you his or her number one business/career/work challenge. Now dig a little deeper, and try to uncover a personal goal or dream. And if the opportunity presents itself, learn at least one important story or event from his or her life.

With some, you may have to coax a bit — but you’ll be surprised how many will open up right away. And once they do…

Ask if there’s some way you can be of service — is there something you can do to help with their challenge or get them closer to their personal goal? Even if that person declines your offer, he or she will appreciate your asking.

At the end of the week, you’ll not only have a much deeper knowledge of each individual on your team, you’ll have shown each individual that you care. And then you’ll be ready for The 2nd Conversation.

Stay tuned for that, but first, give this one a try and let me know how it goes.

This day-and-a-half program will help you apply the principles of Extreme Leadership directly to your business. You’ll leave with a specific roadmap for weaving Love, Energy, Audacity, and Proof into the very fabric of your team, project, company, or organization.

It’s going to be great work and a lot of fun. (I can’t really do it any other way, you know).

Early Bird pricing ends today, but it’s a great value no matter how you slice it. There are considerable discounts for bringing your team, too.  Space is limited to 150 participants.

Click here to register.

1. They are all made up of human beings
2. Human beings perform better with great leadership (although not necessarily the traditional top-down kind).
3. Great team leaders foster meaningful connection among the members of the team.

Teams thrive on collaboration made up of meaningful connection with one another, and individual team members will perform better when they feel like they’re all in it together. You need to connect your team members to one another on a personal level. So, if you find yourself leading (or being expected to lead) a virtual team, your primary job is to go out of your way to facilitate the very interpersonal connection that remoteness tends to inhibit.

And while nothing encourages trust and connection better than good old locked-in-the-same-room, face-to-face, oxygen-sharing meetings and social time, assume that you’ll never have that luxury with your virtual team. Even though it is, arguably, easier to lead a team that lives under the same roof, that’s a rarity these days. The good news is you can still get your team to know, trust and commit to each other by using virtual collaboration tools like web conferencing and social workspaces to enjoy face-to-face conversations and continuous collaboration.

Connection is all about conversation, and, as the team lead, you’re in charge of making sure those conversations happen.

So, what do you think? What conversations do you need to have with your team to get them connected, on the same page, and ready to work together across time and distance?

I’ll share my top 3 conversations soon.

Keep in mind the context of that now bygone era: CD-ROM was the latest, sparkly new technology, the internet was essentially a network of electronic brochures downloaded via modem to your computer at the rate of a millennium per page and The Wisdom of Teams by Katzenbach and Smith, first published in 1992, was all the rage in management circles.

“Everybody’s always asking me about the best way to build a team,” said Drucker in his thick, German accent. “But it’s just a silly question, really, because it assumes that all teams are alike. But they’re not. A baseball team is different from a football team is different from a tennis doubles team. You have to have the right team structure for the business and challenge.”

That had never occurred to me before, but it seemed so obvious after I heard him say it: Build your team structure to best suit your business need and be willing to tear it down and start over with a new structure as the needs change — and change they will.

Here we are 20 years later, living in a technological world more globalized, interconnected and mobile than even the venerable Peter Drucker could have imagined, and new kinds of teams — driven by new media, challenges and opportunities — are sprouting up every day: virtual teams within a global company and project teams composed of people from different companies who may have never met in person. We’re working in what some have dubbed a “freelance economy,” where it is no longer necessary to have a company or formal team in common in order to work together to accomplish a project.

So, what do you think? In this brave, new world, do the “old” principles of leadership and team-building still apply?

So, there’s no time like the present to purge the energy-suckers around you and yours. Here’s your challenge:

Get rid of the things in your work life that sap you and your folks of the energy required to do great things–the unnecessary, bureaucratic policies and procedures that suck the life out of you.

Encourage yourself and others to root out and discard any work that hinders your cause. Determine what you might be doing that keeps you from fulfilling your goals and dreams, as well as your customers’. Now, stop doing them.

Figure out what must be changed to make your office a more interesting, exciting, and awesome place to work.

What will you start with today?

Hurry! Summer’s coming!

“Now,” says Michael, “we have people lining up to join us because this is the kind of place they have always wanted to work in.”  (Michael shared more of his experience as a testimonial for the upcoming Extreme Leadership Intensive in Des Moines, Iowa. You can read his words here.)

The team at Entisys’ new Southern California office helped to create their own space. The pictures below are of the internal office windows they designed and installed, and the hallway message that represents the credo they all stand for.  All done without Micheal’s prior knowledge, by the way.

I’ll be visiting their SoCal office and sharing the inspiring details of their story soon, so stay tuned!

I’m working with the phenomenal Richard Del Maestro, who is not only a skilled engineer and editor, but a brilliant director, too. When Darren Hardy, publisher of Success Magazine, introduced us a while back, he told me that Richard is the only person on the planet that I should consider if I were to ever record another audio book.

High praise from an eminently credible source. So…Richard it was. And is. And he is truly remarkable.

I’ll share a chunk of our work as we get chapters in the can. So, for today, here’s Chapter 1. Stay tuned for more over the next couple of weeks.

Tommy Spaulding’s GTY Project, Ethan Fisher from Steve Farber on Vimeo.

“Truly great leaders in life become so because they cause others to be greater then themselves. Dedicating yourself to bringing others along so that they can achieve more than you is the ultimate way to boost talent, ramp productivity and create truly significant current and future leaders.”

The act of Greater Than Yourself, of taking someone on as your “GTY Project,” is most powerful when you extend yourself unconditionally–with no expectation of getting anything in return.

With one exception:

Demand that your GTY takes on a GTY of his or her own–and so on down the line.

This past summer, at an emotional, inspiring, and very public moment during The Extreme Leadership Summit, my GTY, Tommy Spaulding, paid it forward. (You can see Tommy’s and my story here, and view his website here.)

Fortunately for you, we captured it all on video. Tommy Spaulding introduces his GTY, Ethan Fisher, for the first time. I recommend that you watch it all the way through to the end.

You’re going to need a tissue for this.

By the way…with Tommy’s help, Ethan has started his own non-profit organization called LifeCONsequences, which uses Ethan’s personal story to educate students and student athletes about the real dangers of drugs and alcohol.

Who is your GTY Project going to be?