United we stand, divided we fall
A famous quote written years ago that stated the grave law of team building and management in a simple yet effective way.
Teamwork is a subtle art of pooling efforts and inputs from the members of a project or a business in order to attain a certain common goal. It takes a great deal of leadership qualities to effectively build great teams. Leaders who are not afraid to take difficult decisions, correct course, improvise and more essentially, establish standards of performance at all times.
Team building is one of those vague terms that managers often misinterpret as an exercise for putting into play a group of members for a certain outcome. Rather it’s an art that requires a great deal of efforts than simply deploying work units. It’s an integrated and yet an ongoing approach where the leader who can build high-performance teams consistently is worth their weight in gold.
The underlying purpose of team building is to develop a workgroup that is effective in engaging with collaborated efforts to produce an effective outcome while recognizing the interdependence among work units. Building lasting teams requires leaders to master the ‘art of managing people’ and a right person in the right place at the right time can do wonders not only for the team but for an entire organization. A sustainable team has a real impact on business and that’s why we bring you some of the best ways to successfully establish effective work groups:
1. Understand How You Work:
The very first step to effective team building is getting to know your style of work. As a leader of your team, you will first want to analyze your style of leadership before engaging your team into achieving herculean tasks. It’s important that your team accepts you as a leader and you ought to critically evaluate your leadership qualities while improvising in the areas that will bring enthusiasm to your team. While effectively leading, you might have the best of intentions for your workgroup. However, there are times when you might face criticism and that’s the time where you need to analyze, modify your approach and course-correct if need be. The key is to respond not to react. This will ensure you gain the respect as a leader.
2. Get to Know Your People:
At the core of the team building process is the part where you get to know the members of your team. Encouraging trust and mutual respect among your team is the best way to assure your team works cohesively. Embrace all the differences but discuss the importance of caring. Hear out the needs of every member but understand only the needs of the team. As a leader, you ought to gather information on the strengths and capabilities of each and every member of the team. Knowing your team fully and understanding their needs is the key maximizing performance and results. A member that brings opinions to the table is a real asset. Once you fully understand your team you will understand what motivates them and how can you bring the best out of each person from your team.
3. Define Roles & Responsibilities, Develop a System:
Once you know your style of leadership and the qualities of your team members, you will be able to deploy tasks to each member more effectively. As easy as it sounds defining roles and responsibilities clearly to a group of thriving members is not an easy step, for in the real world the roles you define might lie right outside their job description. While the roles and responsibilities of every team member may be interconnected, you cannot leave behind loose ends where your team member is simply ineffective to fit in the workplace or the system that you have created. You should have a keen eye for talent and remember that while your team member is not fit to conduct the job that you deploy, you could utilize his natural talents that can be put to best use to align their interests with your organization.
4. Improvise, Acknowledge, Reward and Communicate:
Always take time to improvise your course of action. As the facilitator of your team, your efforts should enforce an environment that embraces continuous improvement. Further, you need to acknowledge and reward your team every step in the way. Respect is something that people love and with proper accolades that they have earned and deserve might go a long way. Let your team know that you’re paying attention to their efforts that will organically ignite performance.
While you’re good at rewarding, you also need to take time in reminding someone for their mistakes or how they can improvise. Feedback is an important tool to ensure your team doesn’t go off-track. A proactive leader will not wait for a problem to happen but will actually prevent it by constantly providing feedbacks. Establish a proper communication channel and make sure your feedback is authentic and impactful.
5. Celebrating Every Little Success is the Key:
While uncertainties are a routine part of your daily jobs, you need to take time to celebrate the success of your team. A step beyond acknowledging, celebrating about something reflects the importance of what you have accomplished while taking a step back and understanding the key takeaways from the journey. Spread the positivity among you because for in an accomplishment there is always a success story while will definitely involve cases of sacrifice, tremendous efforts,and perseverance.
The process of team building and establishing standards of performance always goes a long way while affecting an organization at different levels. An effective team member will always realize about the different approaches, the better ones, that exist in real life situations to handle work more effectively while rendering great harmony within an organization. A pool of right dynamics of team members, the right decisions of a leader and diverse personalities within the team will always work wonders bringing effectiveness in the work of an organization.
Harrish Sairaman is a well-known motivational teacher in India, helping many to achieve which once seemed unachievable like increase motivation, leadership, Corporate Performance, decrease stress etc. through Leadership training programs , Corporate training, Entrepreneur Coaching and Individual Coaching to name a few.