Posts Tagged ‘team results’

As your career starts to gain momentum and you start to demonstrate what you can deliver personally, chances are you will find yourself in a position where you are given your own team to lead. Leading a team brings with it a number of challenges and can feel like no matter what you do someone will be unhappy. So if you are to succeed as a team leader, what 5 qualities are essential to your success?

Quality 1: An effective listener

One of the most important and yet most challenging things for team leaders is effectively listening to others. It can be hugely tempting to try and rely on your position power to make things happen and while this might get some results in the short term it is unlikely to work in the long term. Make listening more effectively and actively a priority if you want to make an immediate improvement in your team leadership competency.

Quality 2: Treating everyone fairly

Just as in life, there will be some people that you connect with more than others. This in itself is not a problem as such unless it starts to compromise how you treat others. Treat everyone fairly and you will gain the respect and support of those that you lead in most cases.

Quality 3: Providing clear direction

As the leader of the team you need to provide direction to others. This includes giving a clear message of the overall direction of the team or function as well as clearly setting the expectations of the team of people that you lead. If you fail to do this, chances are that the results that you deliver will be less than they could potentially be.

Quality 4: Making decisions

You might not always have 100% support for every decision that you make but people will value the fact that you take decisions. Being led by someone who procrastinates over every decision is a huge de-motivator and hugely frustrating for those that you lead.

Quality 5: A genuine interest in others

If you don’t show any interest in helping others to achieve results and success in their careers why should they be interested in helping you get results? Team leaders who make the time to take a genuine interest in helping others achieve results will get benefits well in excess of the investment of time and energy that that they make.

Bottom Line – Team leadership is challenging and rewarding. Doing some simple things exceptionally can make a huge difference to the results and success that you achieve.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps professionals and organisations to achieve better results through improved team working.  Click here for my free audio masterclass Leading and Managing Highly Productive and Highly Positive Teams

We all know that when we are part of a successful team it feels like we have the ability to achieve just about anything.

 

In any team one of the most important components in being successful is having a clear purpose.  Think about it if a team does not have a clear purpose it is going to be difficult to:

 

• Assess what progress is being made

 

• Determine whether the team is on or off track

 

• Identify what needs to change when things are not working

 

While most people understand that it is important to have a clear purpose, achieving this in practice is often more difficult.  A good indicator that you have a clear purpose is when individual team members can easily articulate what the team is trying to achieve.

 

A good example of the complete opposite is when the team is vague and people talk in vague terms like improved efficiency, better engagement, customer satisfaction or better productivity to name just a few.

 

So how can you get a crystal clear purpose for your team?

 

Make the time to define the purpose

 

Seems obvious but how often is it done in practice.  Chances are the team is established to either address a problem or exploit an opportunity.  What is the problem or the opportunity?  Answering this question will get you off to a flying start in having a clear purpose.

 

Check out understanding

 

You might think you have a crystal clear purpose if you are the leader.  Yet the team members might have a different point of view.  Ask the team members to describe in their own words their understanding of the purpose so that you can get to a point of common understanding.

 

Keep it simple

 

It is really easy to become over elaborate and make things more complicated than necessary.  Generally simpler is better.  For example, 98% of employees paid correctly is simple and crystal clear as a purpose.

 

Bottom Line – Creating a clear purpose is core to team results.  So what steps do you need to take to define the team purpose and get better results?

 

 

 

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become great leaders and managers and improve team working.  For more information click here

A team is a group of people doing something together to produce a specific result or outcome.  None of us, no matter how good we are can be great at everything.  So what are 6 key advantages of teams?

 

Advantage 1: Increases productivity

 

Organisations are continuously looking for efficiency or productivity gains as a source of competitive advantage.  Teams, especially those that are close to the point of delivery can identify what needs to change to boost productivity better than any group of senior managers could ever hope to.  Let the team focus on productivity and the organisation gains.

 

Advantage 2: Improves communication skills

 

For teams to succeed they need to be able to get their messages across, listen effectively to other points of view and build on ideas.  As a result of being on the team, people are getting the opportunity to develop and improve their communication skills.

 

Advantage 3: Diversity of skills

 

Some people in organisations thrive in dealing with the big picture stuff.  Others get their kick from getting immersed in the detail.  There will be others who thrive on idea generation and others who love to take something from concept to finished article.  This diverse range of people skills and working together have the potential to deliver a much better solution than any one individual could ever hope to do.

 

Advantage 4: Improved problem solving

 

Think about a time when you had a problem that you needed to solve.  You probably get so far and then end up getting stuck because of your own range of experience or knowledge. When you have access to the wider range of skills and knowledge you ultimately solve problems faster and better.

 

Advantage 5: Process improvement

 

Few business processes operate in isolation just within one area of the organisation.  They tend to cross functions and even geographical boundaries.  A team with insights of different parts of the process will clearly be better placed to make successful process improvements.

Advantage 6: Smarter use of resources

 

When a team has focus on getting a specific result, chances are they will find creative ways of using the resources at their disposal rather than focusing on the constraints.

 

Bottom Line – There are numerous advantages of teams.  What else would you add to the list of advantages.

 

 

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps professional people to improve their leadership and management skills and getting better results through teams.  For information about services and programmes click here 

We have all probably been in situations where a team was formed and before it even got to work, there were others who had doubts whether it would achieve anything.  Often these teams do not just achieve what was expected but they go on to exceed expectations.  So how can teams not just achieve results but exceed expectations of others?

1. Goal clarity

Team members need to understand what they are trying to achieve and why it is important to achieve.  This combination removes any fuzziness and also gets the team connected to the downsides and upsides of achievement or non achievement.  For example, a goal might be to reduce the time it takes from taking an order to receiving payment from a customer by 5 days.  This might be important because it allows the company to reduce borrowing to finance day to day working capital and allow the opportunity to borrow to finance new investments.

2. Create team buy-in

Teams will only really strive to deliver results if they are totally bought into the benefits of the results.  Take for example people who work on development projects in third world countries.  These people are totally bought into the benefits of say providing safe drinking water or building a new medical facility.  If you want to exceed expectations, make sure you create buy-in.

3. Value contributions

Every member of a team brings something special to a team.  You don’t want to miss out on that contribution do you?  When the team brings the full range of potential and contribution it achieves more.  It might take a bit of time and training to get people to the stage where they are taking and building on different perspectives but when they reach that stage the possibilities are endless.

4. Aim high

A team can aim to deliver what is required and this will provide benefits.  Chances are the team will identify other opportunities to create what might be an even better result.  Encourage teams to aim high and provide the best possible outcome.

5. Keep focus on the results

Obstacles, objections, cynicism and other barriers will appear.  It is all too easy to get sucked into a position where you are trying to defend the rights and wrongs of what you are trying to achieve.  Resist this and keep the focus on the results.

Bottom line – Teams have the potential not just to deliver results but to exceed expectations.  So what will you do differently on your team?

A team exists to deliver results.  We have all seen or experienced the benefits of being part of a team.  We can recall that it was challenging but there was a real determination to get the right result.  It can often seem like results just happen.  While there will be situations or opportunities that arise by chance, success in a teams does not happen by chance.  What three ingredients must teams have to achieve success?

Skills

It is hard to imagine achieving anything without skills.  Successful teams recognise that achieving results is not just about mastering one area.  To prosper they need a range of complimentary skills.

Firstly they need the right technical skills.  Having technical skills across a wide range of disciplines is highly unlikely.  For example, how confident would you be if you were introduced to a surgeon who was the technical expert in hip replacements and then being told that same surgeon was the hospital’s technical expert in IT, Accounting and Human Resources?   The challenge is to find those with the complimentary technical skills and blend them together.

Secondly, teams need to have the skills to problem solve otherwise they will just become stuck when faced with the inevitable and sometimes unexpected obstacles they will face.

The third area of skill is interpersonal skills.  This includes areas like communicating, influencing, getting others on board with the team’s ideas and dealing with conflict to name just a few.

Commitment

Teams are generally faced with one or more performance challenges.  These for example, could be related to delays in discharging patients from a hospital, high error rates in a production process, problems with staff retention or delivery delays.  Commitment in a team is about:

• Agreeing a specific set of goals

• Agreeing an approach to achieving those goals

• Having a clear purpose

Accountability

We are all familiar with the concept of being accountable for what we deliver individually.  In teams this personal accountability still exists but mutual accountability is another vital addition in successful teams.  Mutual accountability brings with it risk and requires high levels of trust, respect and commitment.  This presents a challenge for many teams and requires new ways of thinking and behaving.

At the end of the day teams focusing on a particular performance challenge can achieve more than one individual on their own.  The challenge is how to develop and embrace these three essential ingredients and incorporate them into the way the team works.

One of the great benefits of a team is the range of skills, knowledge, experience and personal attributes that they can draw on to address a problem or issue.  On the other hand, the full potential of this diverse range of expertise is often not fully exploited.  This might be due to one or more of the following factors:

• People don’t fully appreciate what others are good at

• People make assumptions about what people can or cannot do rather than finding out

• People think and maybe even believe that they are masters at everything

• People don’t like acknowledging that they are not great at some things for fear of losing face or worrying how it will change others perceptions of them

As the leader of the team your job is to make sure that you get each and every one of your team members performing at their optimal level, so take the time and make the effort to discover and exploit the strengths of your team members.