The major challenge for the new start-ups today is , how to build a strong team ? The next challenge could be , how to transform the team into an organization when the business scales up ? Great organizations sprout from great teams . Leaders initially focus on developing their team . A team becomes the seed which then forms a tree and finally these trees make a wood called a corporation . In this article , I am tracing the process of forming winning teams .

In the formative years , when a leader conceives the mission , hardly anybody supports his cause . People have their own apprehensions , reservations and doubts . Initially , a leader has to do a lot of hardselling for the mission .

In the year 2008 , the president of Board of Cricket Control of India ( BCCI ) conceived an idea for 20-20 cricket . It was a new format of the game and based on the concept of the NBA . People laughed at him . Nobody was prepared to take the franchise . He ran pillar to post like an entrepreneur getting into the start-up . Somehow he convinced family and friends to be owners of 8 different teams . In 2013 , Indian Premium League ( IPL ) became a mega success . But the BCCI president was charged guilty of being involved in a number of questionable activities while running the IPL including rigging bids and also awarding contracts without the board ' s permission . Today IPL is a Rs 4.5 billion business and the most successful format of cricket paying better returns to players and income to BCCI . ( Read the Disclaimer at the end ).

Leaders create leaders who keep transmitting virtual reality called vision and attract more people to make the team . People can ' t see what leaders see . What is real to leaders , is virtual to others . Most visionary leaders were mocked in their formative years . But leaders are storytellers . They soon start gathering people who believe in their stories . Leaders don them VR-goggles so that they start living the virtual reality which leaders create . The team is never appointed . It gets formed on the way .

Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj demonstrated his team-building skills . He showed how

High morale of an inspired team helps to operate flat structures reducing need for supervision and danglers of motivation . Flat structures bring cohesiveness to the team . The focus remains on problem-solving rather than rotating a problem in circles , up and down within the structure . Flat structure and cohesiveness facilitate better coordination and cooperation . to form a team from scratch and develop it organically . He inspired his friends when he was just a teenager . They got bonded to him and saw his dream of selfrule ( Swarajya ).

Alexander the Great ’ s actions demonstrated , what could be accomplished when a ‘ magnificent obsession ’ is transformed into ' collective imagination '. He did it with rhetorical skills and won the commitment of his team . He must be credited for building a team and transforming the team into a mega military organization to conquer the world . Alexander knew how to build a committed team to operate on each other ' s strengths .

Be it Alexander or Shivaji Maharaj or William Wallace of Scotland , they always led their teams from the front , setting the example of a good worrier , inspiring and training every member of their team . These legends knew very well what was required to be done to build teams , make them operate efficiently , and transform them by scaling up and forming structure .

Team Formation

In a typical chemical process , solids are precipitated from liquid solutions . In this process of crystalization atoms and molecules get re-arranged to form a solid structure . Team formation is a kind of chemical process . A team gets formed when different members get hooked to developing strong , informal , emotional bonds while working for the common cause . The pace and nature of the team formation depends on chemistry among people and the leader . When a team is

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Developing Winning Teams