Effective teams are teams that accomplish their purpose. Here are 10 tips for managers to keep in mind who want their teams (and who doesn’t) to be effective. The danger to an organization when teams are not effective is griping, complaining, and avoiding the team meetings because the employees feel it is wasting their time or they are unpleasant to attend.
Here are 10 tips to keep in mind:
- Know the individuals’ backgrounds so that you are building all the skills, knowledge, and experience needed into the team. You might need some members from other departments or roles in your organization. You may even want to bring some participants from outside your organization. For example, it may be helpful to have a customer or supplier on the team.
- Look for diversity of thinking styles so that you get multiple viewpoints and approaches.
- Introduce everyone on the first day even if you think they may know each other. Emphasize why each was requested for the team – or if not based on requests, what you expect them to bring to the total.
- Explain how the various roles they will play will create the solution or result. It is not that they are all doing the same thing. Think of a baseball team not a rope-pull.
- Spend time at the first meeting discussing the vision: where you want the team to end up. This is not just a statement made, it is a discussion so all team members buy into the vision, the long-term goal.
- Next discuss the mission for the group. How will they work together, what will be the process? Answer the questions when, where, how, who and why as applied to the meetings.
- Develop a strategy, a plan to get the team from where they are now to that end goal. Develop the strategy together so you have complete buy-in.
- Write out the strategy, the plan, and hang it on the wall or give copies to all team members. This has to be a working plan that gets pulled out at every meeting and becomes dog-eared and changed when and if necessary.
- Do check-ins and reward progress especially if this is a project that will take weeks or months or longer.
- Finally, the whole team gets rewarded for good results. An effective team combines their work to produce a higher level of success and celebrates that achievement together.
