1 of 7 Keys to crafting powerfully effective teams
Who would not want to head up or be part of a Winning Team? “Successful teams” don’t just happen in a vacuum.
They are built, crafted by design to become just that – highly competent, effective and geared for achievement.
Creating an effective team is essential for achieving your goals and shifting your organisation to the next level. Here are 7 Key Factors to guide you in fine tuning your existing team or in choosing who best to bring on board in that next critical selection.
This article covers topic 1 of the 7 keys to building powerful and effective teams, namely: Culture, Work Force Planning, Team Dynamics, Values, Trust, Onboarding, and Defined Roles and Objectives.
Culture: Your team culture is a powerful component that shapes the way people work, influencing relationship development, their openness to collaboration, enjoyment of their role and ‘place’ in the organisation. All of this ultimately determines the accomplishments and overall success of your team and by extension the organisation as a whole.
Let’s define culture as “our unique operating standard”, specifically the spoken and unspoken rules that govern the way your team operates. “Culture” encompasses the collective mission, values, behaviours, beliefs, underlying assumptions, attitudes, integrated patterns, team members’ assimilated engagement, shared knowledge and individual behaviours that are expressed within the group.
In other words, the way that every person works and operates affects the larger team, either increasing each member’s productivity and harmony, or creating disruption and discord. In the process, the ‘group’ determines the culture, what is “acceptable” or “the standard”. As an example, the way the team deals will disagreements could range from having open discussion to a “heated debate” (as long as its behind closed doors), to football battles over email that last until someone gives in or the ref calls a “time out”.
By defining your culture, you then have a clear set of guiding principles from which to benchmark, in order to ensure that when recruiting and selecting the right talent, it’s not just skill, experience and level of competency that guides your choice, but also the ability for the new team member to thrive in that particular environment.
This then poses the question, is your culture geared or ‘designed’ to be powerful and effective? Do you really know what you’re looking for in new members so that they can be effectively integrated into that culture? Have you taken the time to identify what you need to add or refine in order to enhance what currently defines your culture? And lastly, who is best suited to assist you in finding that perfect match?
