Coaching practices for How to Build a Balanced Team

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Build a Balanced Team, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I look around at the people I’ve hired and they all think exactly like me
• Everyone on my team is quietly playing for their own scoreboard
• My team keeps dropping the ball at the same stage every single project
• Some people on my team never really seem to feel part of it
• When I actually look back over my week it’s almost all stress and irritation with barely any genuinely good moments in it, and I want to see that balance honestly instead of just sensing it’s off.

Practices that may help

1. Build a team whose combined strengths cover all four domains
   Hire and assemble deliberately for domain coverage, not for people who think like you.
   Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
2. Align around collective results, not individual status
   Teams fail when members prioritize their own visibility or department’s success over the shared goal.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
3. Map your team’s genius coverage
   Check whether all six activities are covered by someone who finds them energizing.
   The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
4. Establish inclusion safety — belonging without conditions
   Make every team member feel valued and accepted as a human being before expecting performance.
   The Four Stages of Psychological Safety
5. Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
   Strengths-based leadership, developed by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie building on Gallup’s decades of manager research, holds that the most effective leaders invest in their own strengths and build teams whose combined strengths cover all four leadership domains — executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking. Gallup’s correlational research consistently finds that strength-focused teams report higher engagement and performance, though the causal direction is not fully established.
6. Monitor and adjust your positivity ratio
   Track the ratio of positive to negative emotional states in your day — not to suppress the negative, but to ensure the positive is present in proportion.
   Broaden-and-Build, Made Practical
7. Distinguish rebalancing from raising — they are different goals
   A lopsided wheel needs rebalancing; a uniformly low wheel needs investment — know which problem you have.
   The Wheel of Life, Made Practical
8. Invest more development effort in your strengths than in your weaknesses
   Move from average to excellent in your strength areas rather than from poor to average in your weak ones.
   Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
9. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders
   The same people perform differently under different leadership — so start with the leadership.
   Extreme Ownership, Made Practical
10. Manage LMX differentiation fairly as a leader
    Acknowledge that you develop different relationships with different people — and ensure the differences are earned, not arbitrary.
    Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), Made Practical

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.