Team Relationships

The Importance Of Team Relationships In Your Own Department

Strong teams create strong organisations; weak teams create weak organisations.

More and more organisations depend on well-functioning teams to serve customers, innovate and improve productivity. Creating and maintaining effective teams can however be a challenge. Effective teams can provide dramatic improvements over traditional work structures, but they often fall short.

Now the question arises: How can leaders ensure healthy teams?

The role of the Team Leader: Create Participative Team Relationships

The role of the team leader is to ensure that teams are focused towards a shared mission and goals; that goals can be measured and continuous feedback given to improve.

In this part we recap on creating a mission and goals and look at additional roles the team leader play to ensure maximum performance of the team.

The role of the team leader facilitate the process of :

Create a Shared Mission

Successful teams know their purpose – what the reason is for their existence. Teams that fail, often attribute their failure to an unclear focus. For the company to be successful everybody should be moving in the same direction.

A good team mission statement should:

• State how the department contribute towards the overall company mission, i.e. what is the department’s reason for existence?
• Clarify what the team is expected to do
• Focus the energies and activities of the team members
• Provide the basis for setting goals, prioritising work and making decisions

The most important aspect of creating your team mission is that the leader cannot do it on his own. To gain maximum buy-in and engagement (employee engagement means that employee’s hearts hands and minds should be involved in the work, not only their hands) from employees, team members themselves should develop the mission. The role of the leader is merely that of facilitator and gatekeeper.

What to include in your mission statement:

• A statement of the overall purpose of the department.
• Description of the key customers.
• Key results to be attained.
• Other factors such as alliance partners, important deliverables, deadlines and critical technologies could be added if they add value.

Click here to view a video that explains how inclusive leaders build relationships and teams.

Set Goals and Measure Results

Without a set of measurable goals, teams can easily be distracted by issues not relevant to the success of the team, the project and the customers.

Not measuring performance is like playing a game without keeping score. A set of clear performance measures allows the team to manage its progress and fulfil the purpose outlined in its mission statement.

Setting Goals: Goals and objectives are statements saying what you want to achieve; how you want to achieve it; at what time you want to achieve it; set up a step-by step plan to prevent procrastination and ensure that goals empower people by participation in the whole process.

Setting Performance Standards

A standard is simply a statement of what will be acceptable performance. Perfection obviously is not standard. Standards should be attainable by the average person and surpassed by superior performance.

Key questions the individual needs to ask himself concerning his job are: “What are the performance standards that need to be maintained/reached in my section?” or “How can I tell when I am performing my job to standard?”

The main requirement of the standard is that it should mean the same thing to the people who are using it. It is better to put emphasis on facts and data rather than opinions and subjective judgment. Not everything can be measured. In making some of the most important business decisions such as, “Will it sell?" or "Will he fit into his job?” or “Should we trust them?” judgment as well as measurement must be used. Any standard, which enables you to distinguish failure from success, is better than none at all.

Finally, it is important to apply a standard to the end result or output of the job – measure whether you have achieved what you have set out to achieve in your goal setting.

Putting it all in a Action Plan

Action plans provide a method for identifying who needs to do what and when in what order to accomplish an objective. In other words, action plans outline and sequence the steps and the resources (people, finance, time, and equipment) needed to achieve the performance objective. The benefits of action plans include:

• break complex or seemingly overwhelming objectives into manageable performance objectives,
• help prevent delays caused by omitting important steps or failing to begin critical action steps early enough,
• produce better estimates of how much time or money is needed to carry out a project or to attain an objective,
• communicate and clarify the roles of people involved in meeting the objective by clearly establishing accountabilities and deadlines,
• provide check-points to help the people monitor progress toward meeting the objective, and
• help the people to anticipate what might go wrong and to prevent potential problems from occurring.

Action plans are a valuable tool for setting up performance since they specify exactly what needs to be done by when and help both manager and employee track performance progress.

Example of an Action-planning Pro-forma:

Define Team Member Roles and Responsibilities

Clearly defining team member roles and responsibilities upfront is crucial. Begin by jointly deciding what should be expected of all team members. Once in agreement on areas of common responsibility, start determining individual roles.

• Review existing skills and expertise in your team.
• Compare these with skills needed by your goals, objectives and charter.
• Allocate roles and responsibilities clearly.

Identify development needs of team members in order to fulfil your team goals.

Feedback

Each team member’s performance affects the work of the whole team. Giving feedback for improvement requires special skills. Here are three principles to use feedback as performance improvement tool:

• Giving feedback is a way to improve performance of the team, not to make oneself feel better.
• Avoiding critical feedback usually makes things worse.
• Arguing over other’s feelings or perceptions is seldom productive. It is more useful to listen, understand team member’s intent, and ask questions that clear up any confusion.

Develop Operating Guidelines

To function effectively, a team needs to clearly set out its expectations about behaviour and interactions.

Operating guidelines is a set of shared agreements developed by the team which define how team members will interact. For example:

• ‘we will be prepared for meetings’,
• ‘we will treat each other with respect and dignity’ or
• ‘we will follow through on our commitments’.

Click here to view a video that explains being a good team member.

Such guidelines provide a conscious alternative to unspoken norms such as ‘we will defer to management to make decisions’ or ‘we will complain about other team members behind their backs instead of talking with them directly’. Used properly, operating guidelines is a powerful tool for self-regulation and team well being.

As team members give their commitment to help improve team relations and subsequently team efficiency, the team leader should also give his/her commitments. Remember, if your aim is employee engagement, you are not only interested in employees’ hands, but also in their heads and hearts. Although it sounds logical, it is sometimes very hard to get commitment from employees on this level.