Erin McMahon unpacks the magic of teamwork and working well together in this episode. In order to have a cohesive and effective team, the leadership role in any team is key. Leaders at all levels set the tone, they keep the elements of a team unified, and they facilitate clear communication. Erin’s experience with workplace teams gives her insight into what inspires great leadership and which in turn makes solid teams.

While communication is often the key to a team’s success, the tone of that communication is set by the leaders. Leaders have a responsibility to understand how their team communicates most effectively, on what platforms, and that they’re all clear about the overall goal and mission. Erin’s spiritual foundation drives her to also infuse the qualities of compassion, integrity, and unity in the base level of leadership. She elaborates on how these qualities drive team dynamics while also keeping up morale. What base qualities do leaders possess? Whose leadership inspired Erin at a young age? And how can we each rise to our best in leading and being led each day? Erin’s insight paves the way for an exploration into those very questions.

Resources discussed in this episode:

• “Leading with the Heart: Coach K’s Successful Strategies for Basketball, Business, and Life” by Mike Krzyzewski, Donald T. Phillips, and Grant Hill

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Contact Erin McMahon: 

• Website
• Instagram

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Transcript

Erin McMahon: [00:00:03] Hello, this is Erin. Welcome to Seek the Magic. Excited to speak with you today on a lovely Friday. Today I want to talk about the magic of teamwork and working well together. I worked on a lot of teams in my life, and I've also witnessed a lot of teams because I am a huge sports fan and specifically college basketball, I love Duke basketball, but I want to talk about working together and achieving common goals. I speak to a lot of teams, not only on the teams I work with right now at Anchor, but also talking to friends and peers who are in the leadership marketing community, overall tech community, there's a lot of elements that make up a good team or a bad team, and so it's not a one size fits all solution in terms of how teams work well together. But, you know, wanting to speak a little bit about what I think makes an effective team work together and also what, you know, makes an organization work well together.

Erin McMahon: [00:01:12] So first of all, my fundamental definition of teamwork and why it makes a difference in organizations. So communication is key. Deciding on how and when things are communicated, how teams communicate together, which channels they use, which in the distributed workforce tech world is crucial, whether they communicate on Zoom, Slack, Telegram, combination of those things. But learning how and when teammates can rely upon each other and how they talk to each other is very important.

Erin McMahon: [00:01:53] Collaboration, trust and mutual respect. Leaders role in the organization is also very important. The leader sets the tone. Leader and/or leaders set the tone for how teams work best together. So with my team specifically right now, my team at Anchor, have a group of people who are really all-star in terms of what they do and the creative ideas they have and what they come up with. So I feel like my main role when you have team members is to set a clear goal and mission, help them work in their best capacity, and help them develop and cultivate the skills they have and the things they want to do in the best way you can. And also make sure other teams are connecting and collaborating well with them, and making sure that they feel confident and comfortable to take risks and put out their best work. In every organization, there's, you know, a sense of doing your best and providing your best work, but also taking creative risks and not being afraid of failure. So I feel like it is the leader's role to create that environment and do so in the best way they can for their team. Also, I think it's really important for the company to have aligning team goals and making sure that those can connect to leadership. So there are key components to that, and I take my team through exercises every quarter and every year and try to connect to our leadership team on a regular basis and ask, okay, what are those long-term organizational goals? Why do we have them? What are the core principles we want to articulate as a company internally and externally, and how are we going to reach those? And then how do we create tangible goals based on that?

Erin McMahon: [00:03:54] Setting and achieving goals is really important for moving the business forward. So it's important even though we're talking about intangible sometimes company mission is, you know, inspiring and isn't necessarily tangible. You talk about, you know, changing the world or transforming XYZ industry. Those things are very important. And I think those are inspiring for teams. And that's how you can also connect with your customers and advocates to get them on board with what your vision is, but it's also very important to have SMART goals: so those are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. In the marketing organization, it's important to have those. It's also important to have goals that are within that realm also related to content, creativity, branding, etc. so there are ways to measure those, but then also connect with quote/unquote soft goals as well. And it's very important for leaders to set those goals, encourage teammates to come up with and contribute to those goals so they figure out how they can individually connect with them and then feel ownership over them. And if everybody contributes and agrees to the goals, then it is more likely that they are bought into and will help achieve those goals.

Erin McMahon: [00:05:20] So talked a little bit about the intangible nature and this really, I think, is driven at the company mission level, and it's the leadership's responsibility to set the tone. It, you know, can be among the founders of the organization, overall leaders, and I think part of the marketing team's job is to make sure that those are clearly articulated and that they are asking the right questions. So if those goals aren't clear, that the leadership is at least thinking about it and agreeing that it is articulated in a way that they feel comfortable with to both customers, potential customers, as well as employees. As I've talked about in other episodes of this podcast, I have a very spiritual foundation, and even though I don't necessarily infuse that in my work communication, it is a key driver in how I'm thinking about leading a team and how I think about communicating, and really just infuses a lot of my work, whether it gets communicated or not. So I'm talking about at the very base level, spiritual principles of compassion, integrity and unity. So compassion for not only team members, but then also when we're going to market with specific products, speaking with compassion and understanding our user and why they matter. And then integrity speaking, making promises that we can deliver on and that we really believe in. Unity to the extent that the team is all driving towards individual and team goals.

Erin McMahon: [00:07:06] So, you know, ...