Towards better teams

People in every workplace talk about team building, working as a team, and my team, but few understand how to create the experience of team building or how to develop an effective team.

Many view teams as the best organisation design for involving all employees in creating business success and profitability.

In the latter part of the 20th century, "team building" became recognised by many companies as an important factor in providing a quality service and remaining competitive.

Now, in the 21st century, the term "team building" can sometimes seem rather nebulous - people often know that they need it, but aren't quite sure what it is.

As a result, team building is used in all sorts of contexts, even when it is not appropriate.

Some people define a team as being the people who report to the same boss. This can be misleading. In a well-designed organisational structure, people reporting to one boss do often form 'teams'. But this is not always the case. Equally, when designing organisational hierarchies there are often compromises made because of pay structures or the need to have traditional reporting lines.

At some time or other, virtually all managers need to:

• Get to the root causes of poor team performance.
• Increase team productivity.
• Improve the way team members interact.
• Improve a team's ability to solve problems.
• Improve support and trust levels among team members.

Despite all the good things that management books put forward, effective relationships and behaviour within work teams involve the same principles as everyday life - respect for others, integrity, honesty, compassion, courage.

Sometimes people have insecurities or stresses which create difficulties on the surface, to which others in the team then react. Emotional maturity, or emotional Intelligence is a useful perspective. However, if you approach a behavioural problem head-on, or try to resolve it with a team building exercise, this can cause people to clam up and become defensive (just like we all tend to do when someone is critical or implies a weakness).

Instead, it is often better for the team leader to ask workers what they'd enjoy and find helpful for their lives in general. When the manager moves the issue away from work and skills and 'team-building' per se, better results often follow. Essentially, this approach means, helping the person (and people) rather than treating the symptoms.

If you can help team members, as people, with their life-balance and personal fulfilment, they become more emotionally mature, tolerant, positive, independent and self-sufficient. And thus the team benefits – and performs better.

Generally, the leader of any work team has two critical responsibilities. Firstly, the leader is accountable for the effective functioning of the team. Key to maintaining effective functioning is the team's ability to step back periodically and critically examine what is happening. Secondly, the leader is responsible for developing and maintaining a stable structure as the team engages in its work.

Beyond those two general fundamentals, excellent managers are managers who have the personal skills and/or judgement to:

• Decide when to use teams and when they are not appropriate;
• Learn the basic skills critical to working in a team environment;
• Develop effective interpersonal team skills;
• Create a team identity that values and understands diversity;
• Develop key team leadership skills, including using influence without authority; and
• Implement strategies for managing team conflict.

Wherever a workplace team is going to be effective, the leader needs to identify the opportunities for ongoing performance improvement.  There needs to be a clear team role for every team member. Improvement is difficult if people are left out. It is possible, or even likely, that team members who are not informed and involved in the process of change are likely to resist the tough changes that are needed. 

Then the manager can have an additional job of calming everyone’s fears about the change that he or she wants to introduce.