Team Building: Success Is Not a Secret
"Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships."
– Michael Jordan
When’s the last time you did a work project all by yourself? We thought so. Today’s organizations are highly collaborative, both inside the company and with outside partners. As firms have grown globally and technologically, teaming has become the standard for getting work done.
Teams are growing more complex, too. Some team members may be outside your department or your organization, as work is increasingly done by freelancers, vendors, and other stakeholders.
That all means leading teams is increasingly difficult, but also a skill everyone must be good at. Unfortunately, there’s little attention paid to training effective team leaders–and it’s a more complex task than leading people one to one.
When Team Leadership Fails
There are teams at every level of most organizations, which means even the most junior staff find themselves leading teams–usually, with little mentoring or training on how to succeed at this complex people-management task. You may find yourself acting as a team leader informally, simply because no one else stepped up to get a project organized and you saw a need.
The result of the learning gap in team leadership? Often, teams don’t gel–and then they don’t produce useful results.
If you’ve stepped into a team-leadership role, that reflects poorly on you.
The Payoffs for Effective Team Builders
With so many managers struggling to steer successful teams, acquiring this skill is the best opportunity you have to demonstrate your leadership capabilities. If you can build a team that trusts each other and generates innovative solutions, it’s a sure bet senior leadership will notice your achievements.
To be an exceptional team leader, you’ll need to recruit the right mix of skills, personalities, and perspectives to steer and coach team members to achieve team goals. You’ll also need to manage the interpersonal challenges of teaming: build relationships, defuse conflicts, and foster a feeling of safety so people are open to sharing their wildest ideas.
A tip: To lay the foundation for team success, create a written team charter that defines the project’s parameters, benefits, budget, deliverables, and deadlines. There should also be a named project sponsor who will oversee the team’s work.
Watch Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmonson discuss how to turn a group of strangers into a team in this Ted Talk.
What Makes a Team?
A team is an established group of people working on a common goal, not an ad-hoc working group that might come together informally to address a single issue and then disband. An ongoing team with key organizational tasks needs leadership–mentoring, coaching, and direction to achieve its goals.
A great team brings together a mix of complementary skills, a meaningful common purpose, specific performance goals, and a strong understanding of roles and responsibilities, as well as mutual accountability. Diverse participants are included so that the team has many different lived experiences and your work avoids bias.
Read Google’s Guide: Understanding Team Effectiveness
Is Your Team on Track? Measuring Team Goals
Effective teams must accomplish their goals. To know if that’s happening, you need to measure progress as your team project progresses.
This is where many team leaders fall down. They not only don’t measure progress towards team deliverables, orbut also don’t set interpersonal goals that track whether the team is functioning well and avoiding tension. A great team will not only set goals and measure progress–they’ll meet to discuss failures and successes to drive learning along the way.
Finally, are team members being developed? Team participation should always be an opportunity for professional growth.
CHEAT SHEET: 6 Secrets of Managing a High-Performing Team
Ever struggled to lead a team that just didn’t gel? Team dynamics can be tricky to manage. Get your team hitting on all cylinders with these team-management tips:
Create trust and safety so all members feel comfortable sharing their ideas.
Get to know each member through one-on-one meetings, so you understand what makes them tick–and can motivate everyone to give their all.
Manage conflict by spotting interpersonal clashes and giving your team productive ways to resolve differences.
Hold efficient, effective meetings to keep the focus on getting the work done.
Provide feedback and coaching to let team members know how they’re doing, also giving them opportunities to build their skills.
Learn from before- and after-action reviews so that the team’s performance keeps improving.
Resources on Team Building:
Stanford Business Graduate School–Class Takeaways: Managing Successful Groups and Teams with Professor Deborah Gruenfeld
Berkeley–Steps to Building an Effective Team
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About Us
Ed Barrows and Laura M. Downing have nearly 60 years’ experience as certified coaches and university professors and work with high-potential leaders in the world’s top organizations. They’ve distilled their knowledge and research into twelve fundamentals leaders need most to advance in their organizations today. Learn more at www.twelveskills.com.
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