As business leaders, we’re often tasked with the role of improving team dynamics and efficiency. When dynamics are strong, a team works well together. When dynamics are poor, the team’s effectiveness reduces. Achieving optimum team efficiency is not always simple to do, so you may need a little support to make those all-important improvements. If this is the case for you, then this 4 step guide will help.
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Goal-setting
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Identifying strengths
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Clarify roles
If everyone is clear about their own role and how it contributes to the wider team goals, projects will move forward more quickly and are more likely to run more smoothly. Be clear about who will take the lead, reiterate the importance of support roles, and spell out the critical areas within each team member’s area of responsibility. Also make sure that people understand how their roles overlap and intertwine and show how others are dependent on their work to enable them to do a good job. Making sure your team knows how their own piece fits into the jigsaw will improve performance and productivity. You can use Belbin’s classic team roles framework and tools to help you determine role types.
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Create a support network
By committing to shared goals at the start of a project, team members can understand and commit to the targets they’re working towards. This will increase the chances of everyone being engaged and committed to achieving their shared vision. Brett Steenbarger discusses the importance of meaning and purpose of goals in this interesting Forbes article.
This Harvard Business Review article highlights the importance of teams including people who aren’t just high performers, but who have a unique balance of skills and mindsets that allow them to keep their focus, agility, and optimism in the face of uncertainty. By identifying these strengths and allocating work based on the specific strengths of individual team members, you can make sure that each of your team players is highly capable as well as truly motivated to do a great job under pressure. This can quickly improve team efficiency and help you to achieve excellent results.
Use individual and group coaching and peer support to help team members feel supported. Make time in meetings for team members to share challenges and successes, to create a shared knowledge base and a feeling of mutual support. Allow your team to experiment and take risks, and make sure that everyone feels safe doing so by showing mistakes as opportunities for learning. In Business Matters Magazine, Grant Powell discusses the crucial importance of support networks and advises on how we can best create and maintain these in business.
How can Catalyst help?
At Catalyst, we help business leaders and senior managers across the UK to develop the effectiveness of themselves and their teams through mentoring, executive coaching and group facilitation. We help leaders to collaborate and communicate with integrity, to unlock insight through innovation and to improve business performance. We also offer consulting support tailored to individual business needs and objectives.
We combine our extensive business experience with a wide range of techniques to deliver tangible results – that’s why 100% of our customers would recommend us to others. Take a look at some of our results.
If you’d like to talk to us about helping you or your managers to become top-performing, please get in touch.