Team Building

It is a vision of all leaders to develop high performance teams.

Team members work together to accomplish the purpose. The team in which an individual team member agrees on who will do a particular job, how schedules will be set and adhered to and how the group make decisions.

Allow me to suggest some common approaches to team building.

1. Leaders have to show direction. This can be done through clear vision and mission of the organization. Leaders must develop some sense of urgency. Otherwise, the organization won’t move to the next level. Teams usually work at their best level in urgent situations.

2. Get capable members based on skill not just personalities. Skills at individual level such as interpersonal and problem solving skills are important in order to have pool of diverse human potentials. Skills at organizational level such as managerial and technical skills would help the team to advance in their work.

3. Concentrate on action. Meeting without action is useless. Attributes like open attitude, flexible and focus on the agenda are needed from the chairman of the meeting. He should allow open discussion to deal with individual concerns at the end of the meeting. More important is the follow-up action to matters that have been discussed.

4. Clear regulations are vital. Rules on certain expected behaviours promote focus and commitment. The team member who violate rules and regulations should be reprimanded and firm action should be taken when necessary.

5. Plan short and long-term strategic tasks. Strategic planning needs to concentrate on SWAT analysis and individual performances have to be measured using KPI.

6. Challenge the team members with new ideas. Regular brainstorming activities should generate new ideas. Like it or not, team leaders have to read extensively in order to generate new way of doing things. Team members have to be receptive to new and innovative ideas.

7. Spent time together. Many high performance organizations allocate some space for their members to interact both formally and informally. Creative organizations even allocate some room for their staff to relax and engage in some kind of recreational activities.

8. Use power of positive reinforcement. This is the skill that need to be learned by all team leaders. Positive reinforcement promotes feeling of appreciation and the need to contribute back to the organization.