To ensure success in today's workplace, building effective teams is essential. Successful teams are able to produce results greater than if each member was to work individually. Here are seven tips to implement to create an effective team in the workplace:
- Build a team with the right skill set
While it may be tempting to build a team based upon relationships and complementing personalities, it is important ensure the team has the right skill set. If the skills required to accomplish the task are not present in the team it will be extremely difficult to produce optimal results.
- Begin with a clear purpose
Clarity is crucial. Vagueness of goals decreases the effectiveness of teams. How is it possible to achieve the end goal if it is unknown what it is? By creating clear goals and developing a common purpose team members are able to work together to accomplish these goals instead of trying to further their own agendas.
- Establish norms
By establishing norms you are deciding which behavior is okay and which is not. Is it acceptable for team members to be ten minutes late to meetings? Are you allowed to talk about the project with people outside of your team? Establishing norms ensures everyone is on the same page.
- Build trust
If team members lack trust they may be more willing to withhold information which is detrimental to the team. By building trust team members feel safe to share comments and ideas with others.
- Encourage conflict
Most people believe conflict is bad. However, lack of conflict signals apathy and disengagement. It is important to focus on creating cognitive conflict not affective conflict. Affective conflict is interpersonal conflict and has a negative impact on teams. Cognitive conflict, on the other hand, encourages teams to critically think about ideas and is beneficial to teams.
- Incorporate humor
Sometimes working on a team project becomes too tense and serious. Alleviate the intensity with humor. Engage in simple pranks. Laugh about mistakes. Watch a few YouTube videos. Incorporating humor allows team members to take a step back and refocus on what is important.
- Establish buy-in
By establishing buy-in, each team member becomes more fully committed to producing results. Buy-in can be established by listening to and implementing ideas and feedback and creating a sense of fairness when making decisions. Team members feel a greater duty in pushing the team to success when they are personally invested in the results.
No comments:
Post a Comment