 Trying to build the team for your next big project, or do you want to be the one that leads that team? We've got a tool to solve that. Welcome back, leaders, and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. When we work with a great bunch of talented people, it could be a real challenge to figure out who to put on our team for an important project. Everyone has their own talents and skills, strengths and weaknesses, and we want to make sure we build a team that takes advantage of them. There are a few factors you're going to want to consider as you're putting to give your team. The first is what technical skills are required for your team to be successful. These could be things like modeling and simulation experience, accounting, or web design. You're also going to want to think about the soft skills like communication, networking, or marketing that your team might have to have. Finally, you're going to want to keep in mind the leadership abilities you're going to need your team members to have, and those are things like organizational skills, giving feedback to others, or motivating others. Once you've answered those three questions, it's time to put together your team skills matrix. First, lay out the names of your team members on the left-hand side of your page. Next, you're going to list all the skills needed for the project on the top of the page. Now, we're showing a simplified version here to make it clear and easy to understand, but when you do this, you should add all the team members you need and all the skills you believe are important for the project. It sometimes also helps to group the skills into required skills and desired skills. Now that you've got your matrix built, it's time to rate your team on the skills needed for the project. We've used Xs to show that the team member has the skill, but it may make more sense for you to give some kind of numerical rating to each team member in each skill. And not everyone on the team needs to have every skill, but every required skill should be represented by at least one team member. If one is missing, you may need to add someone to your team who has that skill. Now that you understand who's on your team and what their strengths and weaknesses are, you can go forth and get each of them working on the key aspects of the projects that you need them to handle. You may not be leading a team right now and may be asking, how can I get picked to lead the next project team in my group? And you can use the team skills matrix to make that happen. Take the initiative to build a skills matrix of all of the people in your work area and use that to create your dream team for an upcoming project. Use your matrix to pitch to your boss that you've come up with the ideal team for the project and that you're the ideal candidate to lead the team. Don't forget to show your leadership skills and talents as part of the matrix to make your case to your boss. So let's say that John is looking to lead the team for this project. When we look at the skills matrix, we find that John has many of the soft skills needed for this project, but John just doesn't have the experience or skill and web design that this project requires. That's okay though, because both Bob and Sally have web design skills and can handle the work for that team. And as an added benefit, John can learn a little bit about web design through reading this project and further himself through this experience. If you found this useful, download our team skills matrix template from the website and come back later in the week where we'll be talking about some different kinds of skills you can add to that matrix. The best way to get ahold of that, click off on that globe to the right and that'll get you to subscribe to our email list and bring all of our content direct to your inbox. Thanks for watching, really appreciate it, and remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.