How do we create effective teams? What comes to mind when you think about an effective team? High performing teams exhibit accountability, purpose, cohesiveness, and collaboration. It is a team that works seamlessly as a whole. Everyone brings unique talents and strengths and support each other to bring out the best in everyone. How do you create one?
Effective teamwork is essential in today’s world. Based on your experience you would have noticed that a team does not become effective from the very onset. For teams to function effectively, they must be created properly. It is really challenging to do things right in the beginning to make sure that you get the level of effectiveness you desire when you're putting together a new team. The task is much easier if you have a plan in place. This article summarizes a practical, step-by-step process for building and maintaining an effective team.
Most managers rush into the work of setting up the team without getting clear agreements in the beginning about where they are going or how they want to get there. Clarifying and understanding your expectations from the new team upfront will help you determine its structure and will set up your team for success.
Do the Pre-work in stage1 itself. Understand the nature of work that needs to be accomplished. Determine if a team is necessary to accomplish the task. Once you have established the need for the team, begin by defining the goal of your team. What is its ultimate purpose that this team must aim for? What are your expectations from the members of the team? How will your team contribute to your organization's goals and mission? What authority the group should have?
Then create a Team Charter to help clarify your team's objectives. Focus on the aspects listed below while creating a charter and clarify each of these aspects of teamwork. Discuss the questions listed and record your agreements. Many of these questions can be answered immediately. Others will need to be answered or modified as you get into the formation stage.
Try to ensure that no tasks or responsibilities overlap unnecessarily between roles, as this could cause problems later on.
Once you've defined your goals, and have identified the roles and the structures, the next step is to identify and make a list of the type of people that you want on your team. Focus on the questions listed below to have a better understanding of the talent and expertise you need for your team:
Great managers know that talented people are their greatest resource, and the hardest asset to find and keep. The key to build an effective team is to spend an inordinate amount of time on people issues: finding, recruiting, developing, coaching, and providing feedback to them. Start by spending time to ensure that the team consists of all personnel necessary to do the job. The next step is to recruit and establish boundaries by deciding who is and is not in the team. When you bring new people on board, make sure that you recruit effectively and professionally. Analyze your roles and build a recruitment process that ensures the best possible talent to fill these roles.
During this phase arrive at an agreement regarding the tasks to be performed with your new team members and also take the opportunity to clarify the behaviors expected of each team member. Use your Team Charter to build an understanding of team objectives. Each person should clearly understand the goals of the group and should know how these fit with your organization's overall objectives.
Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) linking your team's tasks to your organization's goal and objectives and use these indicators to start managing performance. Team members should be clear about the definitions of these KPIs and must understand how they affect them directly so that they understand their deliverables and how they will be measured. Provide all the needed materials and equipment to do the job effectively.
As your team begins to work together, allow some time for people to get to know one another, as at this stage you need to establish a way each team member can exchange ideas and build mutual trust. Successful groups are built on trust and collaboration. A free exchange of ideas, in an open environment, will allow your team to get to know each other and enable you to check on how they work together. You might even want to consider conducting team-building exercises to help build team trust and establish personal bonds.
Setting up a series of informal meetings, early on in your project, offers an ideal opportunity for team member exploration. Like other teams, your people will also most likely progress through several predictable stages of team formation and help them bond with each other, as they move from being strangers to form a cohesive team. Use this time to discuss your project, delegate particular tasks, set individual roles, and discuss objectives. Always make sure that everyone involved understands every stage of their involvement.
A good team will satisfy its internal or external clients, become stronger as a unit as time passes, and foster the learning and growth of its individual members. You may want to conduct an assessment of the training needs of your members to explore whether people need further training, or need specific opportunities to develop their skills. You may refer to the expectations you captured in the team charter and based on your observations chart a developmental plan to help new team members build the skills they need. Many team leaders and organizations limit training to the induction stage but an ongoing training process will help them become more effective.
One of the most important roles that you have as a team manager is that of keeping individuals motivated and energized to keep working for organizational goals. Try to tailor your efforts based on the different needs of each individual (refer to the Situational Leadership Model). Building effective teams is a continuous process – keep revisiting each step of this process on a regular basis.
Have you ever noticed how we express ourselves or interact with each other? Have you ever wondered what communication is and what role it plays in our lives? One may wonder if communication is so omnipresent and integral to our lives, why study communication at all? We need to study communication because it is a complex process that consists of many elements and is also beset with a number of barriers and there is a need to remove the barriers so that the communication process is effective.
Teams are part of the modern organizational culture. Whether you are a team leader or a team member, having a better understanding of how teams work, and being able to identify where the team is in the process, is a critical part of ensuring the team is ultimately successful. Start with the basics and understand what a team is and what role they play in an organization.
In today's innovation-driven economy, understanding how to generate great ideas has become an urgent managerial priority. Managers need to encourage and champion ideas and need to help their organizations incorporate diverse perspectives, which spur creative insights and facilitate creative collaboration by harnessing new technologies. Innovation is the embodiment, combination, and/or synthesis of knowledge in original, relevant, valued new products, processes, or services.
Tools for Developing Your Team
If a manager has too many weak spots in the talent of the team, the ability to empower the team members to independently execute the project is impaired. Assignments fall behind schedule or stretch out because the needed skills or knowledge are not in place when needed. To successfully execute important projects, hiring talented people, and increasing the talents of existing staff are most important.
Many people think communication is easy. It is said that communication can never be a hundred percent complete. Many factors are involved in the process of communication and something can always go wrong with one or more of these. It becomes difficult and complex when we put barriers in communication. Recognize barriers to interpersonal communication and examine specific strategies for overcoming those barriers.
The development of teams is an ongoing process because the composition of the team may keep on changing. The new members may join and the old members may leave the team. The team members pass through several stages for the development of the team and there has been a lot of research to identify these stages. In this article, we discuss the common theories of team development.
Many different types of teams have been identified by social scientists. Managers may encounter the diverse types of challenges while managing different kinds of teams. Challenges associated with Cross-Functional Teams might be different from that of a Geographically Dispersed Team or a Virtual Team. This article explores some common categories and subtypes of teams.
Facilitative Leadership is all about involving the employees in the decision-making process at all levels enhancing their sense of ownership, responsibility, and motivation. Facilitative leadership style uses a number of indirect communication patterns to help the group reach consensus and build commitment for the decision taken. To be effective in modern organizations, managers need to become facilitative leaders, learn what it means to be a one.
Team Development by Building Trust
As your team begins to work together, you need to establish a way each team member can exchange ideas and build mutual trust. Successful groups are built on trust and collaboration. A free exchange of ideas, in an open environment, will allow your team to get to know each other and enable you to check on how they work together. Learn some tips to help build team trust and establish personal bonds.
A manager or an employee in an organization who is experiencing a high level of stress may develop high blood pressure, ulcers, irritability, difficulty in making routine decisions, loss of appetite, accident proneness, and the like. These can be subsumed under three general categories, physiological, psychological, and behavioral symptoms. Stress can give rise to a number of changes.
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