Building your team is not merely hiring and assembling a group of people who work together. It takes a concise, complete, and measurable understanding of your cultural requirements. You must identify and understand the key competencies, skills, and attributes you expect in your team, by department and even with each job. Achieving this objective will take time, patience, adaptability, and an implementation of the following steps.
Step 1: Define the Type of Team You Want
Strategically, you must have a clear understanding of the type of team you want. Examining the world of sports can help. Many different types of teams exist: golf, baseball, football, basketball, tennis, and a multitude of others.
Every team requires a different set of talents, experiences, competencies, and attributes.
Visualize a "golf team." Each player is an individual contributor. Multiple players perform exactly the same tasks. The same skill set is needed from each person. There is very little interaction with fellow team members. There is no bench strength to substitute mid-stream. While the team has a common objective, it's all about individual efforts. You might better classify these individual contributors as a loosely-knit "work group."
In baseball, nine individual contributors comprise the "team." Each player is a specialist. They do work together, but often, each player acts independently from other the players. Certain leagues allow for highly specialized players to contribute. Examples include the designated hitter, a pinch-hitter, a pinch runner, or utility players. Each plays infrequently and contributes in a highly specialized manner. Having talented bench strength comes with added burdens to the organization. Baseball might well be a combination of a work group and a team.
Basketball has been defined as a "true" team sport. Each team member must possess multiple talents. Demands are placed on players to contribute in one or more positions during a game. They must understand complex offenses and detailed defenses. They are required to quickly adapt their style of play depending on their opponents. Game plans can change instantly, requiring tremendous flexibility from everyone. Since there are only five players on the floor at any one time, all players must play together to be successful.
Tennis doubles requires a different set of skills and attributes. Each person must be strong at both offensive positions and in either defensive role. Players must act in harmony with the other, cover for each other, and coordinate efforts constantly. In essence, two people are performing nearly the same duties and have nearly equal responsibilities. They are interchangeable. In your company, is duplication of efforts the team look you need?
In the end, you may utilize elements from several different team models. Initially, your team may look like one type of team and morph into a completely different one as market conditions warrant.
While it's important to determine which type of team you want, there are other key factors to consider.
Step 2: Identify the Soft Skills, Attitudes, and Behaviors
Since 85-90% of turnover can be traced back to inappropriate soft skills, attitudes and behaviors, it is critical that these attributes be identified.
Several years ago, a company I know of was building a team from the ground up. It believed that team members needed to hold degrees from only a select group of schools. Its thinking was that smart people would create success. While education and intelligence were two ingredients, other key components were not identified and integrated.
Once the company recognized it had missing pieces, it worked with an outside consultant to identify which soft skills, attitudes, and behaviors were integral to creating a high performing team. The company measured all three areas in each job, which helped it crystallize what the culture of each job should look like. Then, it integrated these factors into their hiring and employee development processes. As the team began to solidify, turnover decreased, sales increased, and job satisfaction improved.
Step 3: Demonstrate Key Leadership Traits
Leadership demands are immense. You invest time, energy, and effort to identify the type of team you want and benchmark the attributes and experiences you need in your line employees. Yet, it's easy to bypass your executive team.
Recently, a group of CEOs was asked to identify the traits and attributes it expected in an executive team. The CEOs had difficulty articulating the measurable soft skills, personality, and personal behaviors necessary to be a successful executive team member. Yet, they quickly articulated their business goals and financial objectives.
Build an effective team by starting at the top of your organization. Identify the experience, education, soft skills, attitudes and behaviors required for superior performance for every executive role.
Step 4: Demonstrate Trust, Respect, and Effective Communications
Trust cannot be under estimated or taken for-granted. A group of CEOs was asked to answer this question, "What have you done to build trust amongst your management team?" A long pause ensued. The silence was deafening!
Don't stop with answering that question. Ask, "How is trust built and maintained throughout the whole company?" Building trust is an on-going process. Without it, where is your team?
Respect goes hand-in-hand with trust. How do you and everyone else display respect for others? This includes, but is not limited to, respect for their honesty, their position, their talents, their experience, and their efforts. Your words and actions must by in-sync. Without respect, where is trust?
Effective communications cannot be over emphasized. Open, candid and frequent communications are essential ingredients in building, developing and retaining team members. It can take a year or more to "learn the other team members" style of communications. My clients consciously decide to accelerate this critical area. Using a communications assessment tool, teams learn how to improve lines of communications within a matter of hours vs. months. Work relationships improve and the team becomes stronger, faster!
Building an effective team is both a science and an art. And team building is not a one-time exercise! It requires constant nurturing, attention, and hard work on everyone's part.