What keeps your squad from turning into a high-performance team? Why are most of the members not motivated encouraging others to perform lower? Why are they not able to make decisions and hold a discussion together to find solutions to the problems? These problems are familiar to many leaders. It is important to realize reasons for such behavior and prevent it timely. Hopefully, the practice of team building has discovered seven elements of teamwork to reach high-performance.
1. Set direction
What is necessary for effective teamwork? You, as an effective leader, have to set a vision to what your organization is going to be in three of five years. For example, customer support representative department is doing the routine job every day, but with the understanding that their routine can lead to better customer engagement and as a result, higher income and more bonuses. You also have to make the team understand the bigger picture, the mission of the company. Explain the command why does the company exist. You also have to explain the role of the team in this mission and why it is better than a single person.
2. Gather and deploy resources
After setting a direction, it is important to care about resources. Make different parts of a team identify the type of resources you need and the reason you need them. This is an important step. Defining the resources will help you to create a clear and compelling business case.
3. Assemble the team
Components of a team are not the members, but their skills and the ability to trust each other to create working chemistry. Think about the skills your members need and assemble the right combination of them. You have to reach an understanding and trust. This must be not only the trust between them as equal members but also the trust between you as a leader and them.
4. Allocate work and prioritize efforts
Learn to balance the workload across all of the members equally. Think about the strategy you want to use. Divide your business into elements reasonably and effectively. You also have to set the achievable goals which are realistic and will stretch the organization forward. Another important issue is prioritizing your efforts to focus on the most important things.
5. Execute the plan
After setting the priorities, it is time to execute the plan. This step includes making decisions, which depend entirely on the leader of the team. Once you have made all the important decision, you have to measure the results and adjust them accordingly. In this case, you don’t need a teamwork. Instead, you have to prove your team that all the decisions made are reasonably and thoughtfully. Here it is important to mention that the skill requires training.
6. Motivation
Only in this step, you have to think about the ways to motivate your people. It is necessary to acknowledge how you are going to empower and give them the authority to do their duties. Think about enabling them to make decisions. It may grant them with the sense of responsibility. Give the feedback on the performance and timely defuse a conflict which may appear in the process. Run it smoothly.
7. Long-term development
Think in advance how are you going to develop skills of your members. You should think about developing depth of the capabilities and develop a clear strategy. Stretch assignments help people in their effective growth. If you can execute all the seven elements of the high-performing command, it means that you are delivering the company a significant contribution.
Authored By Emma Rundle
Emma Rundle is a business management consultant, blogger and freelance writer for australianwritings.com.au She has a rich experience in boosting the efficiency of teamwork. Many companies have improved performance due to her consultations.
