7 Top-Notch Team-Building Tips from Proven Team Leaders

Exela’s Chief Executive, Ron Cogburn, loves telling a good story, especially one with a useful lesson, and when he does, the members of #TeamExela (all 22,000 of us) take notes. Of course, we aren’t the only ones. At the beginning of this year’s baseball season, Ron wowed Forbes readers by placing predictive analytics squarely into the glove pocket of baseball manager Billy Beane’s transformation of the baseball business back in the late 1990s. Now, Ron is at it again, weighing in with other members of the Forbes Technology Council, on the best and most effective team-building techniques.

Ensuring your team is working as a cohesive unit takes real management skill, the Council notes at the outset, but the “range of personalities,” and “varying work and communications styles” often presents challenges. So how do talented team leaders bring their team members together for the best and most effective collaboration? You can read the full story here, but I happen to have the inside scoop on how some of Exela’s team leaders have brought to bear some of the most unique and unexpected strategies into building their top-notch teams. I’m sharing the highlights here, beginning with Ron’s team-building tip.

• Ron Cogburn—CEO of Exela Technologies
  “This will sound silly to the stuffier side of the business community, but in my company, we hug. There is no faster way to build a relationship of trust and a feeling of unity within a team than to have a little physical, but professional, contact between team members when greeting each other or saying goodbye. Even the most misanthropic people tend to feel some camaraderie with the people they hug.”

• Eliza Leonardis – Director, Marketing and Communications at Exela Technologies
  "Get to know your team on a personal level. Taking the time to get to know one another as people enables authentic collaboration. It's almost like we can finish one another's sentences, and that just might be the secret sauce for moving as quickly as our jobs require, which is basically warp speed."
  Note: As one of Eliza's team members, I can completely vouch for that. My first week onboard at Exela involved not only a flurry of one-on-one getting-to-know-you meetings but also a team dinner at a local tapas place. There’ve been more team dinners as others have on-boarded, and I look forward to many more as we grow in force.

• Jeff Gershowitz, General Counsel of Exela Technologies
  “We have weekly phone calls with the entire legal team, which is geographically spread out. As part of the call, members are welcome to offer sincere kudos to other team members— thanking them for contributions, their dedication, and their accomplishments.” And guess what? They always do. And it’s been proving highly effective at boosting team identity and empathy.
  In addition, Exela’s Deputy General Counsel, Erik Mengwall, clued me on Jeff’s now-famous “morning walks.” “Every morning, I try to personally walk by everyone’s office to say hello, check in, see how things are going.” As a result of the “morning walks,” Jeff’s team is uniquely “checked in” with one another. Every team has issues from time to time, but those issues never have a chance to fester with Jeff’s approach.

• Carlos Mallen, Senior Vice President Human Resources for Exela (Americas and Europe)
  “Every day Exela leaders from across the globe focus on keeping their teams together. Whether it's going to lunch together, playing on a company sports teams with each other, or just coming together for a summer picnic or barbeque with coworkers, or a cake to celebrate a new hire or major service anniversary, the idea is the same - have fun and get to know each other. The better we know each other and the more we train ourselves to have fun at work, the easier it will be for our teams to band together and work through the tougher times like a crazy deliverable or a truly complex problem we need to make ridiculously simple in a high trust environment. It's these little things that make us successful... go team!”

• John Garippa, SVP Banking and Financial Services at Exela
  John’s “cross-pollination” approach begins with the rather brave acknowledgement that to the extent every team member has unique strengths, they also can benefit from the strengths of others on the team. John leverages the diversity of strengths into synergies, and his team members understand the team is strong because of those synergies. Of his unique “no I in Team,” approach, John says the end game is that “the whole team value is greater than the sum of its parts.”
  Here’s where you can learn more about Exela’s suite of banking and financial services solutions.

• Charlene Hickman, Manager – Proposal Development at Exela
  Charlene, who manages and coordinates the proposals Exela creates for its customers and potential customers, including those responding to RFPs, has the challenging task of managing a single team of proposal writers who are located in disparate locations around the world. To keep the team operating as a team, Charlene likes to staff projects with pairs of writers from disparate locations. For example, she will pair an India-based writer with a Stamford, Connecticut-based writer. “This pairing fosters idea sharing, collaboration, and team building, as well as provide ‘follow the sun’ support to the sales community,” Charlene explains.

For more up-to-the-minute Exela news, including more our thought leaders, stay tuned to the Exela Blog. To learn more about Exela’s rapidly deployable business process automation solutions, check out our Solutions page.