An effective team is the foundation of every successful organization. The internal relationships of a team drive them towards better performance. An interdependent network of a team always outperforms a disjoint collective one, where people work individually. And as a leader, the matters of efficiency and productivity find cradle on your shoulders.
The opportunity of building an efficient team from ground-up always seems to catch up to entrepreneurs and leaders. If you’re starting a new business or making your organization better prepared for opportunities, knowing the art of making an efficient team is crucial for you. Here are six tips to keep in mind whenever you get the opportunity of starting an efficient team from the ground up.
- Define Your Goals
A team without a defined direction makes the efforts of the members add up to zero. Defining your goals helps the members in aligning their efforts in a single direction. You need to ask yourself about your vision of the team’s success and decide your goal accordingly. It can be anything from launching a new product or service to managing costs or deadlines with your existing ventures.
- Identify the Necessary Skills
There is a limit to what you can achieve from hard-work or even smart-work without a skill. So, the next step after determining your team’s goal is to identify the skill sets necessary for the individual members to possess to achieve those goals. Remember not to be hasty in naming the members just yet as it can prove to be counterproductive. Even the potential members proficient in the desired skillsets might not be suitable for your team for other reasons.
- Identify the Necessary Behaviors
Only the skill expertise isn’t enough to be finalizing members. You also need to define a set of behaviors that you need in every member. These correct behaviors ensure that individual members can function seamlessly as a team. A candidate with all the checkboxes checked might not be a good fit for the team because of being careless with deadlines or terrible communication.
- Identify the Rules and Expectation
Setting some ground rules for the team is the first step to establish the work culture of the team. Identifying the team’s norms helps in creating a team dynamic that is fueled by the members’ awareness of team expectations. These rules and expectations act as a framework to create an efficient work environment by supporting team agreement, communication, and work culture.
- Consistent Performance Evaluation
Evaluating team performance with individual performance is imperative to determine effectiveness. Another important thing is to see this evaluation with the glasses of self-evaluation and correction apart from managerial review. Consistent evaluation not only helps in determining individual strengths but also assesses whether new processes and ways are working for the team or not.
- Create a Safe Environment
A safe environment for a team is one where the members are freely able to make suggestions and pitch ideas without any judgment. The safe environment encourages and accommodates the members’ ambitions and ideas for the team. This makes the team efficient and drives it towards success.
Summing up, assembling and managing a team requires utmost thought and care. If you’re an opportunity to build one, implement logical and thoughtful steps to create a functional, interdependent, and efficient team.
