Building Effective Teams

There are many elements that make up a successful team:

1. Building team trust
2. Knowing what makes your people tick
3. Realising your dream team
4. Cheers for champions
5. Victims and villains
6. Performance improvement
7. Building the quality of your team
8. Walking the walk

1. Building team trust and value
Having trust in your teams builds willingness, and willingness brings results. If you get this right the rest will follow.

Here are many ways to build trust with your team:

Give trust to get trust.
Most people will move mountains to repay this simple but powerful gesture of respect.

Link individual and team priorities to the business strategies and goals.
People thrive when they have context for their work and its importance to the bigger picture. When they can see the value of their contribution they will engage and contribute.

Keep your team informed of the business’ financial results.
Whether your company is publicly traded or privately held, the time you invest in explaining and talking about actual results will be greatly appreciated. Your transparency suggests that you trust your team members with this important information. Make them part of the family, show that you trust them with important information and they will in turn reward you with their loyalty.

Redouble your efforts to understand and support the career aspirations of your team members.
Nothing says “I care” more than investing time and effort into helping someone achieve a goal. Caring begets trust. Invest in your people, show them that you believe in them and value their personal goals.

Show your vulnerabilities.
If you make a mistake, admit it. If you are interested in feedback on your performance, ask for it and then do something positive with the input. Make certain to loop back and thank the team members who provided constructive input.

Regularly give away your authority.
If you run a regular operations meeting, rotate responsibilities to develop the agenda and lead the meeting. As often as possible, delegate decision making to individuals or teams. Any action to show trust by allowing others to decide and act will strengthen their trust in you.

Shine the spotlight brightly on everyone else.
No one trusts the manager who constantly elbows their way to the centre of the spotlight for the team’s accomplishments. Step back into the shadows and your team members will repay you many times over.

Always match your words with your actions.
The do must match the tell or your credibility will suffer, and trust will fade. Walk the walk, do what you say you are going to do – and yes, everyone on your team is keeping score.

Beware of diluting the value of accountability.
Every individual must be accountable for their actions and outcomes. Exceptions to this rule destroy credibility and derail your efforts to build trust.

Do not let the difficult issues linger.
Remember, everyone is watching you, and the clock on your credibility is running. While your team members have empathy for you in navigating the big issues, they expect you to do your job so they can do theirs.

Hold team leaders accountable for building trust with and between their team members.
Your team leaders are a direct reflection of you as the overall leader. Teach them well and hold them accountable to the same standards you hold yourself to.

Teach your teams how to talk, debate and decide.
Instead of demanding easy consensus, teach your team members how to discuss alternative ideas and approaches in pursuit of the best approach. Let them have a voice, be heard, and go through the decision making process to get the best outcomes.

When an employee makes a mistake, encourage them to share the lessons learned.
It goes double for your own mistakes. Use your errors to teach others. Take the learning and create opportunities from them.

Always operate from a clear, visible set of values.
If your business lacks clear values, define the values that describe the aspirational and acceptable behaviors for your team members. Teach and reference the values constantly. Have them around for people to see, use them in presentations, workshops and documents. Live them in all you do.

 
2. What makes your team tick?
What is the make up of your team, how to they operate and what makes them tick? If you don’t know now… find out fast!

You need to:

• Understand what drives each member of your team
• Know how each member will react in certain situations
• Understand what motivates them
• Realise what causes a reduction in motivation
• Know what the performance and behavioural norms are
• Realise that for every single member of your team you will have a different answer to the above

Understanding how employees want to be treated is the first step in getting results from them and engaging them in positive behaviour.

The two aspects of positive behaviour are openness and directness:

• Openness is the degree to which people outwardly show their emotions and develop relationships.
• Directness is the way in which a person deals with information or other people.

Each type of person responds to different priorities and management styles.

To get the best from your team you need to maximise the opportunity to understand what makes your people tick.

 
3. Realising your dream team:
Your dream team is one that has attributes that take them from being a normal functioning team, ticking the boxes, to one that is performing at a high level, achieving over and above. Your dream team has the following:

• ✓ Leadership strength
• ✓ Common goals
• ✓ Responsibilities and accountabilities
• ✓ Creativity and risk
• ✓ Everyone, all together

Leadership strength
Understand that strong leadership isn’t about being authoritarian or running a dictatorship.  Strong leaders are able to show compassion and decisiveness as and when it is required. Leadership styles need to change as the situation dictates or as the needs and outcomes of the team evolve.

Teams with leadership strength accept responsibility for decisions and outcomes and remain passionate about the vision of the team.

When developing your leadership style, walk in their shoes and think from their perspective and level of experience. Remember back to when you were learning and that the obvious is not always obvious.

Learn the fights worth fighting and the benefit of your style to reflect the circumstances, as common sense is not always common.

Common goals
Plan and have common goals that you are all striving for, for your team and for the business. Make sure you are all on the same page and know where you are heading.

Responsibilities and accountabilities
Team member roles and responsibilities should be communicated and followed up. Ensure team members are clear on what their role is in the team and how / when they interact with others.

Ensure team members understand what the responsibilities are of other team members. Keep ‘finger pointing’ and “but that’s not my job” to a minimum by ensuring team members are responsible for helping and supporting other team members in the achievement of their goals.

Creativity and risk
Innovation and improvements are encouraged. Realise that some boundaries and rules are non-negotiable (legislation, health and safety). Other team boundaries can be pushed to inspire something really creative and innovative.

Risk taking (provided it is taken responsibly) may result in achieving something greater than the original goal and create great opportunities. Ensure that creativity and risk taking do not take the team on a tangent away from the required team outcome / goal.

Everyone, all together
For a team to achieve their goals, all members must be contributing because “you are only as strong as the weakest member”. Understanding what drives individuals within the team to achieve their personal goals will ensure that all team members are on-board to achieve the team goals. Quickly identifying team member(s) that are not contributing their share ensures issues are identified, solutions are found, and team members are refocused to achieve goals.

To achieve our goal of settling and maintaining customer service, every function and individual must:

• Demonstrate commitment
• Demonstrate urgency
• Demonstrate an understanding of what is required
• Demonstrate an understanding of what to expect
• Demonstrate communication

 
4. Cheers to champions
Champion team members are those who:

• Take charge of their own role
• Own their responsibilities
• Are accountable for the achievement of their own and the team’s goals
• Are responsible for themselves and support others when required
• Are flexible enough to adapt to change
• Find creative solutions to problems
• Are passionate and engaged in the team and foster the engagement of others

It is our job to leverage these to support our competitive advantage.

 
5. Victims and villains
Success will always be hampered when a team member behaves as either a victim or a villain.

Victims:

• Have a ready supply of excuses as to why something isn’t or won’t work
• Blame other people and situations for their lack of success or poor performance
• Deny, deny, deny that their efforts (or lack there of) are at fault

Villains:

• Sabotage the efforts of others
• Seemingly enjoy ‘fault finding’ and ‘finger pointing’
• Take side and rally support against others
• Often take the negative side: “it won’t work”, “we have tried this all before”

It is your role to change behaviour so that individuals in your team can demonstrate value. To change victims and villains into team champions you will need to look at both the team and the way you manage them.

Consideration should be given towards changing behaviour to support a bright future.

Try to ensure the following occurs:

• No tolerance of complacency
• Commitment
• Ownership – accept your responsibilities
• Work with a sense of urgency
• Take on a can do attitude

Positive power:

If you believe your team is full of negative team members, victims, villains and people ready to sabotage your good work…. chances are that is what you are setting yourself up to get.

Paying attention to the problem areas of your team or where they are failing to meet goals may mean that you miss what is going right and what is on track.

Whilst we don’t want issues or problems to be ignored, not having a balance in the overall effectiveness of the team and team members (the achievements as well as the problems) will sell the team short.

 
6. Performance improvement
Your job is not to find fault, assign blame or hold grudges.  It’s to analyse why people are behaving as they are, and to change the consequences to get the behaviour and performance you desire.

Keeping regular and consistent communication with your team is essential in identifying unsatisfactory performance. Managers / team leaders should:

• Be alert of the signs
• Assess the obvious signs of diminishing performance
• Examine attendance patterns
• Looks for examples of deteriorating behaviour
• Consider changes in personality
• Leaders need to understand what is normal within their team, and conversely be tuned on to what / who is not going well.

Keeping your manager informed allows them to take action once unsatisfactory performance or behaviour is identified. It is an essential process, and you have many options:

• Corrective action
• Re-training
• Coaching
• Counselling
• Mentoring
• Transfer
• Termination

Focus on changing behaviour before it becomes the norm. Be aware of the business or company information, performance management process and support documents. It is your role to be able to clearly identify and document with examples:

• Gradual decline in performance
• Breach of policy
• Unacceptable behavior
• Threat to others and self

Recording and reporting the right information leads to outcomes. Consider the following:

• Clear facts are required to allow for the right actions to occur
• Always ensure confidentiality in how the issue is raised
• Be calm, constructive and consistent
• Support the decisions of the manager
• Provide input into future reviews
• Follow up

Often by putting strong team management practices in place, you will find that people deselect themselves based on the new culture and rules.

This can be reinforced by:

• Strong consistent messages being displayed (through performance and behaviours) regarding the new culture
• Weeding out negative elements with performance management and discipline
• Using group training sessions to build team synergy
• Utilising the dynamics of group sessions, which are very powerful
• Allowing those who are willing to, to enjoy the challenge of improving themselves
• Letting the group positives force out those behaviours and performance standards that are no longer acceptable

 
7. Building the quality of your team
Motivate your team to support service expectations and link to drivers of performance, KPI’s and targets. Use coaching logs and other tools to measure performance. Be flexible and focus on driving change. Manage to your expectations, not perceived capacity. Building a quality team is also about managing conflict and tension confidently and consistently.

Team conflict:
Manage conflict by ensuring that there is a planned approach for handling disagreements or for challenging ideas such as:

• Discourage criticising other team members when they are not present
• Avoid ‘actively recruiting’ extra support for your side
• View disagreements as a matter of team structure rather than personality clashes
• Insist conflicts are addressed immediately
• Focus on the problem rather than the individuals

Tension in teams:

• Conflict and team tension is a normal part of teamwork – The trick is in how it is handled and channelled
• There are only 2 options – ‘Confront the conflict and handle it’ or ‘Let it go’
• Understand the facts – Watch out for people having different facts or interpreting data differently
• Full disclosure – To get people to trust you, you have to be transparent and consistent
• Facilitate resolution – Don’t dictate it
• Intercede when it turns personal

 
8. Walking the walk
We touched on this earlier. Teams succeed when managers send a consistent message about the value of teamwork. Enable your teams to show their individual strengths but also develop and grow skills through the dynamics of the team.

Your team is a reflection of you as the manager. If you lead with strength and respect, delegate and give autonomy, and lead with a balance of humour and humility then the team you lead will reflect those traits.

 
Team success tips:

• Understand and build the individual strengths of your team members.
• Ensure that team members have the chance to identify their own strengths and skills and to be able to use them within the team.
• Work on challenging ways in which they can apply their skills more productively. For example, if they are a gossip, use this to your advantage by feeding them information that you want shared with the rest of the team.
• Look for the positives. Don’t just focus on the negatives.
• Ask the team for ideas and suggestions.
• Use team meetings for reinforcement of team goals, responsibilities and to keep the team on track.
• Break large / difficult tasks down and allocate or delegate responsibility as appropriate.

 
Sharing the workload means that you must share the success.