What I have noticed is that there are some really useful learning points about team success for managers and leaders in business.

There Has To Be Commitment

It’s interesting to notice the difference between the teams who are doing well and those who are struggling.  Those who are thriving have players who are really proud to be representing their country. 

Great Individuals Don’t Make A Team

England have without doubt some talented individuals but they did not seem to gel as a team.  To get the best from a team you clearly have to bring out the best in each individual and get them all playing to their strengths.

Money Is Not The Motivator

If it was the high earners would be performing the best which has proven not to be the case.

The truth is that team success is largely down to a group of people who are committed to a common purpose and are willing to work collectively and support each other to get the result they desire.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to break through the glass ceiling and realise their professional potential.  You can sign up here for his Weekly Leadership and Management Success Tips

One of the great benefits of teams is that you can take what appears to be a mammoth task and divide those tasks between people. As a result, things get done faster.

Creates more ideas

One person operating on their own can generate ideas. At the same time, the breadth of the ideas of one individual will be limited by their experiences to date. With a team with a wide range of experiences, you can generate many more ideas.

You become the facilitator

In his book, Teamwork 101, John C Maxwell states that the true measure of a leader is getting people to work hard together. In many ways, I see this as the leader facilitating or enabling great team performance.

Camaraderie

On all the great teams that I have been part of, there was always a huge sense of camaraderie. This enabled us to get things done even when the odds seemed to be stacked against us.

You learn quickly

One of the fastest ways to get good at something is to see someone in action who is already excellent in an area. When team members all play to their strengths, you learn a lot quickly.

The bottom line

The truth is teams have the potential to deliver great benefits. So what’s the biggest benefit you have experienced from being part of a team?

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. For more information click here

Truth 1: There Will Be Conflict

Teams will from time to time have periods of conflict. This is just the way it is. The challenge is to make sure that the conflict remains productive rather than destructive.

Truth 2: It Is Hard To Get People to Pull In the Same Direction

After nearly 30 years of working in or with teams, I still see people struggling to pull in the same direction. Remember, it is natural to think about the personal impact on you or your people when team decisions are being made.

Truth 3: Building Trust Takes Time

A team does not just come together and instantly work together. There need to be high levels of trust, which take time to build.

Truth 4: There Is No Magic Formula

There are things that you can do; ways in which you act and structure you can put in place. At the end of the day however, there is no magic formula that works every time.

Truth 5: It Takes a Major Mindset Shift

For most of our life, we are judged on what we do individually. For example, most academic achievement is geared towards individual performance. Moving towards team working requires a mindset shift.

The Bottom Line

If you are willing to invest the time and effort in creating team success, you can achieve great results. Just remember that it is more like middle distance running than the 100 metre sprint.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. For more information click here

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

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 

Reason 1: Personal egos get in the way

I am sure the majority of people have come across this one.  It is those times when people on the team are more interested in how they look or are viewed by others than the team objective.  It becomes a competition that has little benefit to the team.  Surprising as it might seem, the more senior the people on the team are, the more likely that this type of power struggle arises.

Reason 2: Turf protection

We all know our own area of the business or organisation really well.  When we go into a team our experiences to date or the norms of our function significantly influence the way we look at things.  As a result people tend to be resistant to anything that might result in more work or change in their area.  When this turf protection mindset is replicated across a team stalemate can easily arise.

Reason 3: Negative attitudes

Teams are often established in order to respond to a particular difficulty or challenge that the organisation is facing.  Sometimes the members are so focussed on the obstacles and the difficulties of the challenges just about everyone starts to become negative.  When this happens it is difficult to make any significant progress.

Reason 4: No one wants to take a decision

The leader should take the decisions- right?  As this often happens most of the time, people when asked to work together find it to take decisions collectively.  This can easily result in a situation where there is a lot of talking, little decision and as a result little action.

Reason 5: The wrong people are on the team

Another challenge is when people are put on a team not because they are the best person to be part of it but because they have some spare capacity.  A variation on this is where senior people are asked to be on a team but don’t participate and always send a deputy.  While there is nothing wrong with someone deputising, the deputy might be reluctant to make major decisions which can hold up progress.

Bottom Line –  Getting teams to work together and deliver results is a real challenge.  What steps do you need to take to improve team working in your organisation?

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.

Hallmark 1: Challenging Objectives

A successful team thrives on challenge and setting them challenging objectives is a great way to motivate them.  Challenging objectives are those that will require significant effort, creativity and imagination to achieve, and at the same time are not so demanding that they feel impossible.

As a leader of a team, the skill you need to master is to set challenging but at the same time achievable objectives.

Hallmark 2: Common Purpose

Why does the team exist in the first place?  Does everyone in the team totally understand the purpose and are they really committed to it?
To achieve success a team needs to fully understand the team purpose and collectively get behind achieving the purpose. 

Making the time to clearly define the team purpose is absolutely essential.  For example, eliminating wasted capacity might not be a great motivator for some.  On the other hand, serving more customers or service users is more than likely to motivate most.

Hallmark 3: Use Resources Smartly

In truth most teams will find themselves short of some resources.  It might be financial resources such a budget or an intangible like a specific skill.  Successful teams know that constraints or limitations will always exist so they focus on using their resources smartly.

Hallmark 4: Mutual Trust

Trust is one of the most essential things in any successful teams and in truth is often one of the most difficult things to achieve.  It takes time, commitment and a willingness to rely on others to deliver.  In many cases it takes a major shift in mindset to achieve.

Hallmark 5: Taking the Rough with the Smooth

No team has it easy all of the time.  There will be periods of amazing progress and periods where the team just feels stuck.  Successful teams understand this and learn to keep focus on the purpose through the good and not so good times.

Bottom Line – Teams success is never guaranteed but keeping your attention on these hallmarks of successful teams can help you to achieve results.

1. Give them a clear purpose

The best teams know why they exist and what issue or issues they are tackling.  In other words they have a very clear purpose.  If you want to get the best from teams give them a clear and unambiguous purpose.

2. Get the right people on the team

If teams are to prosper they need to have people on the team with the right mix of skills, knowledge and personal attributes to deliver results.  Ask yourself what’s missing on a team and then look for ways of getting people on the team to address these gaps.

3. Set expectations

You don’t want to micro manage teams but at the same time you need to be willing to set some expectations of the team.  These expectations will include areas such as what is to be delivered, ways of behaving and ways of interacting to name just a few.

4. Encourage innovation

Have you ever noticed that when you get a group of people together, whole range of ideas and possibilities are created?  Encourage teams to innovate and translate these ideas and possibilities into solutions that result in a step change in performance and results achieved.

5. Support risk taking

When teams are taking risk they are more than likely moving towards action.  Encourage and support teams to take balanced risks having weighed up the benefits and drawbacks.

Bottom Line – Bringing out the best in teams can lead to significant change in organisational performance.  So what do you need to do differently to bring out the best in your teams?

” What are the success ingredients of great teams?”

Almost without exception, one of the first things on the list is having a clear goal.

When you have a clear goal that you can articulate and is understood by everyone in the team, the team has focus.  They know what they are trying to achieve and the goal mobilises them towards achievement.

If you lead a team, how clear are your goals? 

If they are unclear or are not compelling enough, what could you do to address this?

Bottom Line – If you want a team to deliver, make sure the result is crystal clear.