Nobody reaches their goal alone. Tiger Woods wins the tournaments, but his trainers, caddies, and consultants helped prepare him. Writing is a solitary pursuit if ever there was one, but Stephen King has editors, assistants, and his beloved Tabitha supporting him. I challenge you to name a single business or political leader who climbed to the top without first building a team to bring their ideas to life.

The lesson here is that you need to look around and figure out who is on your team. Even if you haven’t stopped to consider if you have one, you do. Your friends, your family, your significant other, your instructor, your coach, your mentor, your therapist, your doctor, your babysitter, your lawyer, your electrician, your webmaster, your cleaning woman, and your barrista. You rely on them to keep things moving forward, to provide the building blocks you assemble into your life, to take care of the things you can’t while you write your novel, build your business, or train for your triathlon. They are many, and they are your team.

I’m a people person, energized by the company of those I find interesting and motivated . I have always known that the wonderful people around me bring color and opportunity into my life. But I have only recently started thinking of them as “my team”. That small shift in perspective made a difference.

My doctor (actually, she’s a physician’s assistant) is part of my team, and a visit to her is more than paying a co-pay and getting treated for what ails me. She is my subject matter expert for medical information, and I go into my visits with notes & questions I’ve jotted down since we last met. I also feel, and cultivate, a personal relationship with her. We joke, catch up, and enjoy one another’s company. I make sure she knows how important she is to me, and that I realize how my health & fitness successes wouldn’t be possible without her. I make sure she feels appreciated. If she were to move to a new medical practice, I would follow her, and she knows it.

Since you are heading up a team, you need to do several things to maximize everyone’s benefits from being on the team.

Carefully select your teammates. If you are going to invest your time and emotional capital in them, make sure they are folks you can rely on. When you meet someone with potential, as an advisor and/or friend, consciously decide if they are the kind of person who you want around you. Are they optimistic? Do they have an attitude that you respect; serious minded, light hearted, pragmatic, etc.? It’s said that you are most strongly influenced by the five people with whom you spend the most time. Think about those five folks in your life, are they them shaping you to be the person you want to be?

When you spend time with your team members, be 100% present. They’re investing in you too, and it’s both respectful and productive to give them all of your focus when you’re around them. This probably seems obvious in the case of a fitness coach or financial advisor, but it’s true of your friends and family too. When you’re with them, be *there*. If there’s something more important to you than spending time with them, then either go do that or put it out of your head until you can do something about it.

As the leader of your team, you need to cultivate and reward those supporting you. Take a real interest in them; learn what their interests are and how they intersect with your own. I know that my masseuse, like me, is an avid reader, so I’ve picked up a copy of a book I particularly liked as a gift for her. I keep my eye open for information on yoga and massage, and talk about it when I’m with her. Usually she already knows more about it than I do, but eventually I’ll bring her something new. I also recommend her to everyone I know who’s interested in massage. Helping her grow her business is something I want to do, because I really appreciate her contributions and I think very highly of her talent.

Expanding your team is also an ongoing projects. You cross paths with plenty people during the course of your week. Friends of friends at cookouts, casual chats with someone behind you at Starbucks, the parents of the other kids on your child’s soccer team. They might be an account, a graphic designer, a school teacher, or a car salesman. You can be pretty certain that you’ll need someone *just like that* at some point in your future, so wouldn’t it be wise to get to know these folk before the need is urgent, see if they would be a good fit, and make an effort to “recruit” them? Constantly meeting people, listening to both their stories and their needs, and then keeping in touch with them (also known as ~gasp~ networking) sounds an awful lot like making friends, doesn’t it?

It’s not all about adding to your team too. You should regularly take the time to review all your relationships, and see if there are things you need to do to develop them. Over time people and businesses change, moving in their own directions. This might mean that your review brings to light the fact that one of your relationships isn’t mutually beneficial anymore, and that it’s time for you both to move on. While sometimes it is a matter of cutting away a relationship that is costing you more than it’s benefiting you, it’s more often a matter of realizing that the situation that moved you to bring someone onto the team has been resolved. When this is the case, I have found it best to be straight-forward with the person. I talk about the situation, face to face if possible, and how I think we’ve solved the problems that brought us together. I make sure I let them know how much I appreciate their help, and how I wouldn’t have been able to achieve that success without them. Don’t say, “I’ll keep in touch”, if you don’t mean it. You’ve got to be as good as your word, and when I say I’ll keep in touch, I follow through (even going so far as to put a recurring reminder in my calendar to call or write them).

Like most things in our lives, it’s alot more work to mindfully approach our relationships with others and take responsibility for them. Seeking out, investing in, deepening, reviewing, and pruning all take effort. I found that the benefits are worth it, and I hope the folks on my team me agree.