Which is most important for YOU will depend on your business, your team members and what you want them to do. For example, if your team members already know each other but haven’t worked together as team before and you need them to work together on something crucial to the overall success of the business – then clear goals and objectives could be most important. On the other hand, if you have a group of inexperienced people based in different offices then strong leadership might the most important factor.
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Strong Leadership
Teams need strong leaders. Everything will go according to plan, won’t it? Oh no it won’t! To avoid having to fire fight when the unexpected happens, a strong Team Leader will clarify the objectives and help the individual members of the team to keep working in the same direction. A strong Team Leader provides guidance, instruction, direction, leadership to the team and monitors the quantitative and qualitative results, thus freeing the team to get on with delivering the results.
Clear Goals and objectives
It doesn’t matter whether you are implementing a new Computer system, moving office or organising an event – you need to be clear what your proposed successful outcome is from a business perspective. This should be a business benefit that is ideally measurable e.g. saving 1 hour a day on entering customer data, creating space for an additional 2 members of staff, having an uninterrupted office environment or raising your profile with 50 new potential customers.
Goals and objectives should not only be clear to you, they should be clear to everyone and agreed by everyone in the team. The team should review the goals often. Otherwise, individuals will soon impose their own ‘version’ of the goals, and before you know it, the individuals will start working towards their own goals NOT the team goals.
Respect for each others differences
One the great things about a team is that the individuals bring different skills to the team. But, perhaps you’ve had the experience where some team members didn’t complete what you expected them to do, or maybe were not quite flexible enough, so things ‘fell between the cracks’ or someone valued for their attention to detail didn’t see the wider picture. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, different people often approach tasks in different and often unexpected ways. To be effective, teams need a mix of different skills and with these come different ways of working. Be aware of this, and respect these differences. After all, someone who sees things differently from you may be able to solve a problem you can’t.