Whether you are a CEO, department manager, frontline supervisor, or project manager; your success depends on work completed by your employees. Their success is built on their ability and willingness to work together. That why it’s well worth your efforts to build a strong team. There are six key team building actions that support this objective. This series addresses each of them.
How to Build Your Team’s Sense of Purpose
A clear and meaningful purpose focuses and energizes your group. For some teams, the purpose is obvious and inspirational. It’s easy to imagine an emergency room team rallying around, “We save lives.” Most work doesn’t feel quite so dramatic. Nevertheless, your team needs to believe in its value. This session will show you how to create a compelling purpose, and use it to build an amazing team.
How to Establish Team Norms
Team members have expectations of one another, just as you have expectations of them. Team norms make these behavioral expectations explicit and provide guidelines for what is and is not okay. While you might be tempted to allow “common sense” to be your guide, know that common sense is rarely common practice. Norms need to be proposed, agreed to, and polished. They also need to be reinforced. Learn how to create norms with your group.
How to Clarify Team Roles and Responsibilities
Many teamwork problems can be traced back to confused roles and responsibilities. There are two clues that you have this problem. The first is fighting over turf. When boundaries aren’t clear, inevitably someone will violate them. The second is when tasks fall through the cracks because nobody owned them. Some of these holes can result in serious consequences. Learn how to help your group sort things out and make sure everyone is clear about who is doing what.
How to Raise Your Team’s Trust Levels
Every team leader strives for high trust levels. While it may appear difficult to influence, there are specific behaviors that help and others that hurt. As the leader, it’s your job to be an outstanding role model and to set the expectations about what you want from others. It’s also your job to respond when trust is low. In this session you’ll diagnose your team’s trust levels and begin to develop a plan to address potential issues.
How to Assess Your Team’s Effectiveness
Strong teams regularly ask, “How well are we working together?” As the leader, you have to initiate this process. While you may need some outside help to get an honest assessment, you can ask some simple questions to get a sense of how things are going for your group. In this session you’ll assess your team for potential trouble spots and create a plan for involving everyone in a more rigorous assessment.
How to Respond to Common Teamwork Problems
Once you’ve assessed your team’s effectiveness, you will most likely identify improvement opportunities. As next steps, you should analyze the problems to understand root causes, develop potential solutions, select the best, try them, and finally evaluate the results. Bring to this session a team problem you want to address. You and the other participants will work together to create solutions that you can then implement on your own.