Most businesses understand that having an effective team is their greatest asset. Those who can field effective teams are often miles ahead of their competition who cannot. Building and managing a good team is not easy, but with the right approach, processes and assessments it can be done.
It starts with alignment. A team must work towards common goals and have the support and training needed to reach and surpass those goals. Often, this training is focused on the team alone and ignores crucial support staff, leaving a vital component of a successful team out of the loop.
=== Building a Team’s Focus
Teams are usually comprised of several individuals with unique talents and specialties. An effective team must be able to both harness those unique talents and ensure proficiency levels across the team as a whole. This is the ‘A-Team’ approach, getting its name from the U.S. military reference to Army special operations squads.
Assessing, expanding, and perfecting each team member’s skills and specializations lays the groundwork for assembling an ?A-Team?. Once the team is organized, each individual should be given the tools to perfect their specialization and provided regular progress reports and self-assessments to measure both their individual and team development. This shared approach builds camaraderie and unity, leading to better goal setting and achievement.
=== Bringing In Support
Management and support staff should also be included in the overall assessment and goal-setting, helping them to understand the team’s needs so that they can be more intuitively met. Every person on the staff, whether a team member or not, should be considered vital to the team’s success. Remember, the core team is just one part of a much larger, entity-wide team of players working towards common goals.
Goals are often set and missed because one facet of the support team was not brought on board or was ignored along the way. Support teams should be organized in a way similar to sales and service teams, with their focus being to help the S&S teams achieve their goals.
=== Full Service Assessments
Periodically, the entire group (including management, support, and core teams) should come together to assess and review operations, customers/ clientele with a focus on providing better services, and address opportunities and challenges.
Organizations that do this on a regular basis see improved morale, increased teamwork, and better cooperation and collaboration overall. When front line sales and service teams can connect with their support teams, they work better together. When management is involved in supporting and directing this collaboration, they can create the policies/processes that build high functioning, effective teams.
=== Bringing This Together With Assessment & Training
All of this begins with hiring the right people and having a clear measure of how your team is performing. Professionally done assessments provide the critical information needed to begin the team building process. Once team building is underway, continued consultation and assessment will help speed up the process, make it more effective and keep the team moving forward towards common goals.