When it comes to a team, building a team, motivating it and always pushing it to improve is essential to allow your business to grow.
A company is only worth as much as the people who make it.
The quality of the work will improve with the quality of the team that composes it.
Many managers still do not understand this simple rule and many companies do not have a balanced, happy and quality team.
For this reason, in this article, we have collected a series of tips to improve not only your team, but also the relationships within it, in order to achieve and enable a perfect symbiosis between the members that make up your team. For, therefore, to improve your work performance.
Let’s get started right away with this practical guide to follow step by step:
1. Give your team members the opportunity to make decisions
Decisions are often made within management and for this reason, those who choose do not always have complete knowledge of the situation relating to a problem and are therefore unable to make the right decisions.
Important decisions should not always be made by management.
If you have a team of trained people, you should give each member the opportunity to make their own decisions for their group or role. This way you will be able to expedite decision making and help build future team leaders based on the members already in your group.
Being able to make decisions also means taking an interest in the company.
Another factor related to ownership is giving your team members the opportunity to more actively “import” their company, thereby increasing their concentration and productivity.
2. Strategic planning should focus on solutions
Strategic planning—that is, when the entire management team sits down and tries to figure out what plan the company should follow in the future—is a waste of time that doesn’t allow management to direct the energy of what’s really important.
It should be important, in fact, to take the time to identify problems related to your products, services, processes or organizations, not just spend time looking at revenue, profit or other rough statistics.
Then use your team to focus on these types of problems, so that they can solve practical problems, hone their technical skills on the products or their processes, and then solve problems that will eventually increase the productivity of the company.
3. Use different brainstorming techniques
When we look for solutions to a problem within a team, we want to create brainstorming groups to find the most appropriate and fastest solution.
Here are some tips to help your team members feel comfortable during the brainstorm to get the best possible results.
Allow more creative elements to express themselves through alternative means – this problem is called “social loafing” and shows that in brainstorming groups, the most creative people often will not express themselves fully because they feel that others will criticize their ideas. To address the problem, it is sufficient to provide an alternative means for simple brainstorming, such as company chats, online forms or in-person meetings.
Avoid Production Blocks – During a brainstorming session the rest of the group has to wait until a colleague shares an idea. Often this waiting time leads to insecurity that drives group members not to express themselves after being interrupted. To avoid this, you can create a pre-brainstorming lineup with all the ideas, so that the ideas are presented in a sequence.
Choose the Right People to Brainstorm – When you have a problem there are people who can help you with their expertise, and others who can’t. Always choose your brainstorming members thoroughly and limit the number to 10, as managing more can be difficult.
4. Align the company’s goals with those of the employees
Everyone does things based on their personal interests. Rather than fighting these interests, the best thing to do would be to align the desires of the workers with their own organizational interests within the company.
Allow your team members to move to a new group if anyone wish, and reward managers who try to transfer their team’s best minds to other groups and direct them to a more appropriate role.
5. Forget skills while hiring
Hiring someone based on already acquired skills is not always a good move. Why? Because
You can always teach new skills, but you will never be able to teach intelligence.
Hire people based on their “raw” intelligence and try to figure out which ones are ready to learn the job quickly.
Some of the smartest people may not have a college major.
Also remember that, ultimately, the problems you really want to solve are problems that no one has ever solved before (especially when it comes to start-ups or small businesses). You have to hire someone who can think “outside the box” and find unique solutions to complex problems.
6. Accept that avoiding seniority is an evil
Recruitment, layoffs and promotions should not be determined by seniority within the company, as it is not based on merit.
Many times you will meet people on your team who feel important because they have worked in the industry for a long time while other members, perhaps recently joined, have better ideas and work harder.
7. Don’t always allow customers to solve the problem
Customer feedback is very important to innovation: we’ve always talked about it – if you’re curious to learn more about innovation and customer relations, click this link.
Let customers show you the problem, but never the solution.
In fact, customers see problems that are invisible within the company because they often have contact with the product or service provided. When it comes to solutions, however, no one can find a better solution than their team.
Give your team a chance to find the best solution.
We already talked about decision making in one point, do you remember? This is a practical aspect of the same point.
8. Execute team building exercises
Well, relationships between coworkers are very important, we talked about that earlier. But how can we build good relationships between different partners? With team building.
Is Team Building Really Useful? It depends on how you do it.
Many people, including employees themselves, despise team building, but the practice should not have this degrading reputation.
The Small Group Research Journal paper called “Does Team Building Work?” analyzed information from 103 different studies to answer the question. And they were able to prove, with the information at hand, that team building has a long-term positive effect on the structure of a team and on the productivity of the individual elements that make up it.
Here’s the secret to team building – start with normal circumstances
Always avoid embarrassing or coercive situations – such as forcing your team to share your deepest fears.
There are various online lists of potential team building that can be used to maximize the positive effects of a group outing. Here is a short list to guide you:
Volunteering – These are the best activities as they can make the whole participating group feel good and allow you to unite the group towards a morally unified and positive cause.
Physical activities – Playing sports is a great way to get together and allow team members to work together for something other than work. The important thing is that the game is chosen based on common interests and everyone can participate (who said bowling?!).
Group trips – Simple casual trips like going to the park or museum or going to the theater to see something can be an opportunity to get together.
Business Activities for Growth – A good workshop can make a difference and allow you to grow your employees, who will feel respected and happier being part of a company that not only pays and values them, Rather, it trains them.
9. There are always stars on your team, but remember that they are not the only members of your group
This title is a bit long, but it will definitely give you an idea of what we will be talking about right now.
There is certainly one or more members in your team who are particularly good and who “shine” more than others who live more in the shadows, but we want to tell you a great truth.
Superstars depend on others to shine!
This may not seem like it at first glance, but the best knights are not the ones who are drawn to production rather than the rest of the group, but are pushed by other members who allow the correct functioning of their work and for their work create an optimal environment.
Why are we telling you this?
Helping the team improve means recognizing the effort that different members of your team are putting in.
Because a good team is important
All of the tips we’ve given you above are just the first step to improving your team and making it perform as well as possible. There are many other possibilities and precautions you can use to optimize your team and its efforts towards new productivity goals!
Tell us what you think about this article and, if you’d like more information on how to improve your team’s performance, let us know!