Successful Workplace Teams – What They Look Like And How To Build Them

Introduction

The team is the basic human unit in the workplace. And effective team development is essential for the success of small-medium business. If you employ people, they must be able to work together effectively.

What’s A Workplace Team?

A workplace team exists where two or more people must work together to achieve business results. Even in relatively small businesses, an employee can easily be a member of more than one.

Characteristics Of A Good Workplace Team

In the workplace an effective team

• has clearly defined goals which each member accepts
• has a clearly defined roles for each member
• each member accepts the defined role and responsibilities of each other member
• team goals are more important than individual goals
• members willingly support other team members to ensure overall effectiveness
• each member accepts that their contribution will be a major factor in measuring their personal performance
• the measure of effectiveness is performance not behaviour
• co-operation with other teams is essential for effective performance

Effectiveness Not Affection

Notice that good interpersonal relationships is not a characteristic of an effective team. It’s usually an outcome. People who work effectively together usually develop good interpersonal relationships. At the very least they learn to tolerate each other’s personal idiosyncrasies.

But there’s no guarantee that a group of people who “get on well” will produce effective business results. I’ve encountered a number of cases where individual team members were far more concerned with maintaining relationships than with results.

Teams Exist Regardless

Teams are the human core of the workplace. Whether admin, sales, production or warehouse or whatever, the team simply exists. As manager you have to deal with this as well as the individuals in them.

Dismiss Definitions

Forget the notion of what’s different about a team or a group or staff versus functional relationships. That sort of thinking leads to paralysis by analysis. You have teams in your workplace. You need them to be effective. That’s the reality.

Team Building v. Team Development

The team exists. Forget about building it too. It’s there. Your job is to ensure it develops into an effective and important unit. It is the human cornerstone of your business success.

Team Development Tips

• Select and train for competence. Employees who are incompetent are the biggest threat to effective team development
• Establish goals: what the team exists to achieve. Each member must accept these goals.
• Clarify individual roles and goals. Each member needs to fully understand the contributions and roles of other members.
• Allow team members to develop relationships in a way that suits them overall.
• Emphasize the importance of co-operation and respect for other teams. Healthy competition between teams is desirable. Competition that attempts to denigrate others is utterly unacceptable.
• Ensure that teams develop effective internal systems to ensure that their goals continue to be achieved in the absence of members.
• Stress the importance of positive co-operation between teams.

Change Your Management Mindset

As managers, we’re taught to focus on individual employee performance. This ignores the reality of the workplace. Each employee depends on other employees to be successful at work. Each employee is a member of at least one team. Their success depends on how effective they are as members.

Conclusion

Concentrate on developing effective teams in your workplace. Ignore so called “personality conflicts”. They’re almost always a result of role and goal conflicts. Focus on sorting our roles and goals. Help teams develop effective systems so that they contribute more effectively for business success. You and your business will be the beneficiaries in the long run.