“Best tips to Build a Team That is Strong and Successful”

Building a successful team is about more than finding a group of people with the right mix of professional skills. It takes great leadership to build great teams. Leaders who are not afraid to course correct, make difficult decisions, and establish standards of performance that are constantly being met and improving at all times. Whether in the workplace, professional sports, or your local community, team building requires a keen understanding of people, their strengths, and what gets them excited to work with others. Team building requires the management of egos and their constant demands for attention and recognition are not always warranted. Team building is both an art and a science and the leader who can consistently build high-performance teams is worth their weight in gold. You may be the mastermind behind the business idea that has led to establishing your company, but your employees are the backbone of its success. No brand, no matter how necessary it may be, is immune to a failure caused by poor internal structure and leadership.

After all, choosing, building, and growing a strong team is the true reflection of your own leadership skills so if you are not happy with your employees, you might want to look at your own decision-making process to see what needs fixing.

To make the most of your teams’ potential and enable them to grow within your company, you can create a designated strategy that will ensure you employ the right people and give them the right tools and support to chase their goals. Effective teams are the core of every successful business.

The first rule of team building is an obvious one: to lead a team effectively, you must first establish your leadership with each team member. Remember that the most effective team leaders build their relationships of trust and loyalty, rather than fear or the power of their positions. Team members of a successful team often share ideas, consider solutions and solve problems together. In strong teams, individual members benefit each other by providing added support and opportunities for each other's development.

Successful teams typically have the following characteristics:

· Consider each employee's ideas as valuable. Remember that there is no such thing as a stupid idea.

· Be aware of employees' unspoken feelings. Set an example to team members by being open with employees and sensitive to their moods and feelings.

· Act as a harmonizing influence. Look for chances to mediate and resolve minor disputes; point continually toward the team's higher goals.

· Responsibility and accountability: Successful teams share their responsibilities and take accountability for every task that belongs to their team collectively. They share a common set of values and goals and each team member can be held to the same standard.

· Clear communication: Strong and successful teams often have clear communication among all their team members. All the members of these teams brainstorm solutions, provide status updates and complete tasks together, and tend to achieve their goals.

· Encourage trust and cooperation among employees on your team. Remember that the relationships team members establish among themselves are every bit as important as those you establish with them. As the team begins to take shape, pay close attention to the ways in which team members work together and take steps to improve communication, cooperation, trust, and respect in those relationships.

· Encourage team members to share information. Emphasize the importance of each team member's contribution and demonstrate how all of their jobs operate together to move the entire team closer to its goal.

· Delegate problem-solving tasks to the team. Let the team work on creative solutions together.

· Facilitate communication. Remember that communication is the single most important factor in successful teamwork. Facilitating communication does not mean holding meetings all the time. Instead, it means setting an example by remaining open to suggestions and concerns, asking questions and offering help, and doing everything you can to avoid confusion in your own communication.

· Establish team values and goals; evaluate team performance. Be sure to talk with members about the progress they are making toward established goals so that employees get a sense both of their success and of the challenges that lie ahead. Address teamwork in performance standards. Discuss with your team:

• What do we really care about in performing our job?
• What does the word success mean to this team?
• What actions can we take to live up to our stated values?

· Make sure that you have a clear idea of what you need to accomplish; that you know what your standards for success are going to be; that you have established clear time frames; and that team members understand their responsibilities.

· Use consensus. Set objectives, solve problems, and plan for action. While it takes much longer to establish consensus, this method ultimately provides better decisions and greater productivity because it secures every employee's commitment to all phases of the work.

· Set ground rules for the team. These are the norms that you and the team establish to ensure efficiency and success. They can be simple directives (Team members are to be punctual for meetings) or general guidelines (Every team member has the right to offer ideas and suggestions), but you should make sure that the team creates these ground rules by consensus and commits to them, both as a group and as individuals.

· Establish a method for arriving at a consensus. You may want to conduct an open debate about the pros and cons of proposals or establish research committees to investigate issues and deliver reports.

· Encourage listening and brainstorming. As a supervisor, your first priority in creating consensus is to stimulate debate. Remember that employees are often afraid to disagree with one another and that this fear can lead your team to make mediocre decisions. When you encourage debate, you inspire creativity and that's how you'll spur your team on to better results.

· Establish the parameters of consensus-building sessions. Be sensitive to the frustration that can mount when the team is not achieving consensus. At the outset of your meeting, establish time limits, and work with the team to achieve consensus within those parameters. Watch out for false consensus; if an agreement is struck too quickly, be careful to probe individual team members to discover their real feelings about the proposed solution.

Steps to use to Build a strong Team

Set SMART goals

Perform well-defined roles

Experiment regularly

Embrace diversity

Share a common culture

Be accountable to the team

Communicate effectively

Welcome strong leadership

An effective team is structured to facilitate collaboration, clear lines of communication, and business results. Again, this can vary by organization, but there tend to be certain “roles” that individual team members fulfill as part of a successful team approach, including:

v The ultimate decision-maker: The person who has final authority to settle disputes, sign off on the direction, or assign specific tasks.

v The leader(s): The person or people with the tenure and first-hand experience to mentor other team members and take the lead on high-value projects.

v The facilitator: The person who is the versatile jack-of-all-trades and can ensure projects are moving forward at all times.

v The individual contributor: The person who is completing the core work at hand, and who may be more junior than the above roles.

Each member of the team should understand existing processes and workflows for working laterally with each other, and vertically with their respective managers. A good team codifies these ground rules and iterates on them over time to ensure operations remain effective.

As you can imagine, not everyone fits neatly into a prescribed role, and some may even chafe at the idea of internal hierarchies within a small team. Especially when building a new team from scratch or migrating to a remote format, the crux of making any of this possible is talent.

The role of leadership in a strong team

Leadership style sets the tone for group dynamics.

As mentioned above, team leaders are vital to the function and growth of the larger team. They can help onboard new staff, improve team performance, and still have the institutional knowledge required to complete day-to-day tasks at a high level.

Some of the hard leadership skills required are:

· Enforcing company protocols and workflows

· Setting quality standards and communicating measurable goals

· Leading by example as shown by high performance and measurable success

· Hiring and training staff in accordance with the above goals and metrics

· Problem-solving on a tactical level

Meanwhile, there are a number of soft leadership skills that might be even more impactful, such as:

· Mentoring and motivating junior staff

· Fostering teamwide collaboration and open communication for all

· Displaying empathy

· Acknowledging the pressures of the job

Setting short and long-term goals with your team also becomes the foundation for every task they set out to complete each day. Being enthusiastic about the outcome and motivating each other with positive reinforcement will help your team members to make sure that they work with a sense of the big picture, knowing why every task they do is necessary for achieving a longer-term goal. It's important to note that these goals should be realistic so that you and your team don't feel like you are working for a lost cause. Having milestones and deadlines can give team members opportunities to help each other out and band together for success.

Celebrating your successes and milestones also brings your team together and allows everyone to see that when they work together, great things can happen. If someone does a great job at something, give them a shout-out in front of the rest of the team so that every effort is seen and appreciated. This also helps each person to feel visible and that what they're doing has an impact. In contrast, if your team fails at something, come together to redirect your efforts or turn them into something positive. Don't throw anyone under the bus or turn a damage-control discussion into a blame game. This never helps anybody. Instead, give your team equal responsibility to put your heads together and figure out the next steps or pivots. “Celebration is a short-lived activity. Don’t ignore it”.

As the leader of the team, you must be extremely aware of your leadership style and techniques. Are they as effective as you think? How well are they accepted by the team you are attempting to lead? Evaluate yourself and be critical about where you can improve, especially in areas that will benefit those whom you are leading. Though you may be in charge, how you work may not be appreciated by those who work for you. You may have good intentions, but make sure you hold yourself accountable to course correct and modify your approach if necessary to assure that you’re leading from a position of strength and respectability.

Feedback is the key to assuring any team is staying on track, but more importantly that it is improving each day. Feedback should be proactive and constant. Many leaders are prone to wait until a problem occurs before they give feedback.

Feedback is simply the art of great communication. It should be something that is part of one’s natural dialogue. Feedback can be both formal and informal. In fact, if it becomes too structured and stiff, it becomes difficult for the feedback to be authentic and impactful.

Remember that every team is different, with its own unique nuances and dynamics. Treat them as such. No cookie-cutter approach is allowed. Allow proactive feedback to serve as your team’s greatest enabler for continuous improvement.

Your team is going to face problems throughout the year. How you respond to these issues will impact how much they trust you and each other, as well as how honest they are when the next issue arises. Build trust and help your team feel protected by remaining positive in your reactions and motivation. Just like encouraging risk-taking requires the celebration of failure, motivation after a problem requires positivity. Support your team respectfully and help them when they need it. Demonstrate that you understand the work they're doing and discuss how it improves your company.

You can get people to take risks and improve their performance when they know these behaviors are encouraged and that failures don't come with public humiliation. While negativity may get you some short-term rewards, it tends to do institutional harm to your team and company over the long term. managing a team is not that simple. Leaders have to play a far more hands-on role to make sure the group works well together and remains focused on the right priorities.

“A team is stronger when everybody delivers on their individual roles”

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