Effective teams deliver results and most would agree that teams as a collective can deliver more than a single individual. At the same time, there is often a huge difference between what people understand and what actually happens in practice.
Making teams more effective often only requires some simple changes and in this article I want to share with you 6 ideas that you can take and implement to get better results from teams.
Tip 1: Keep the focus on performance
It is really easy to focus on things like the number of hours or the number or projects teams are working on and lose sight of performance. Every successful team that I was part of had a strong focus on performance. If you want teams to thrive give them a performance challenge to address.
Tip 2: Have a clear purpose
Effective teams have a clear purpose and know what it is. It might be to improve customer service, develop new products or tackle process bottlenecks to name just a few. The clearer the purpose the greater the impact and effectiveness of the team. When teams lack purpose they just tend to drift.
Tip 3: Make sure you have the right people and mix of skills
One of the great things about a team is that everyone on a team brings something different to the team in terms of skills, experiences and background. Having the right people on a team with different personal and professional attributes and skills can really make a huge difference.
Tip 4: Plug the gaps
Even if at the outset you think you have the right skills, some shortfalls will inevitably arise. Make sure that you give the team the time and support to address skills deficiencies that arise or to do the work to acquire the knowledge they need to keep moving forward. Remember that a gap in a team is like a hole in your bucket.
Tip 5: Allow creativity and balanced risk taking
Creativity is all about considering all of the options; even those that on the face of it might seem completely off the wall. Let people experiment on a small scale and see what seems to working and what is not working. The fact is that any progress is likely to require some kind of risk taking.
Tip 6: Create the conditions for effective teamwork
For most of our life, whether it is in education, careers or even sport, we are conditioned to compete rather than collaborate. The best organisations understand that to enable team working you have to create the conditions that make it more worthwhile to collaborate than compete.
The Bottom Line: Sometimes teams will work and other times they won't. At the same time, often small adjustments can yield big benefits when it comes to teams.
6 Easy To Implement Ideas For Making Teams More Effective 6 Easy To Implement Ideas For Making Teams More Effective
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