Building a strong team usually relies on finding skilled people you can trust, each one of them bringing value to the whole, by their personal, unique strenghts and qualities. Once you succeed in this, it’s up to you to take the challenge of offering them the opportunities to develop their skills, enabling them to become trustful experts which you will always rely on, when being asked for estimations, plans or just plain technical oppinions.
In this context, thinking of them as replaceable only makes you set an artifficial barrier on the way of their personal and the team’s evolution. The only replaceable one should be you, as achieving this translates into a powerful, self-organizing and tightly bound team. You don’t have to be afraid of this, because your company will most probably see it as an act of performance; and if they don’t, you wouldn’t probably want to work there anyway. 
Also, it’s nice to know you can take a one-week holiday once in a while, and when you come back things wouldn’t be a mess.
People usually like taking challenges, so empowering them to do things a little beyond their current knowledge will only help them develop. No proffesional would like to do the same well-known things every day, so by offering them tasks that require study, prototyping or exchange of knowledge with senior colleagues would usually motivate them in their work, so it’s a win-win situation.
Letting your people know about their value should make them feel more responsible for what they do. Still, remember to avoid establishing an environment where everyone tends to be a “star”. Try to create a Star Team rather than a team of stars, by encouraging them to collaborate rather than compete. They need to understand that they all need each other in order to succeed.
When you are fair to your people, they are fair to you in return. This enables them to benefit of evaluations, and improve their skills by taking your positive or negative feedback as useful input in their own development. It is therefore up to you to provide them useful information about their actions, and not theirselves - you don’t want to change them, you want to help them act as needed.
Having the right pieces, sometimes unfortunately means parting with the people that don’t “fit” in the picture you and the others are part of. If there is nothing you can do any more to help a person be on the “right” track, it is in everybody’s interest that he/she moved on. This doesn’t necessarily mean firing them, as you could help them find their place in another team in the company. However, it’s good to keep in mind that negative influences spread quickly, but so do positive ones.
Title picture © Ilya Postnikov | Dreamstime.com
Tags: Team
