When organizations develop teams, their primary aim is to propel the organization towards the desired trajectory. Building a team that meets this quality goes beyond just randomly assembling employees to meet the desired number of individuals. On the contrary, an effective team is formulated evaluating the most suitable group of people who share traits that can be blended. Concisely, developing a team should be critically thought about to realize the desired goals.
Ways of Developing Effective Teams
Making hiring a team effort and not a competition
Cooperation is utterly essential in building an effective team. According to Rao (2016), collaboration yields a win situation for all the participants while a competition yields a win-lose scenario among the participating parties. Rao further indicated that collaboration has several other advantages including sharing of knowledge, capabilities, skills and a wider array of ideas on how to deliver perfect results. As such, the hiring manager could use this knowledge to ensure that the organization’s team of the employee is hired collaboratively.
Understanding Personality types
As Rao (2016) posited, there is a set of four personalities that organizations should be cognizant of to build an effective team. Specifically, the author indicated the personalities include directors, thinkers, socializers and relators. All these personalities have distinctive and contrasting characteristics. For instance, directors are risk-takers, confident and extremely decisive, while relaters are utterly cautious and are always hesitant to take a risk. With such sets of characteristics, it is reasonable to infer that a team that incorporates relaters and directors may not go far. As such, it is necessary to do a thorough scrutiny of people before allocating them their fellow team members.
Building Respect and Trust
Nurturing a team-oriented environment may not be practical without building the existence of respect and trust. Forming a team can be equated to starting sailing in a ship where there are numerous uncertainties. Arguably, nobody would board a ship in a scenario where they do not trust the captain. In the same way, when a team is formulated to achieve a set of objectives, trust and respect is among the essential ingredients to the formation of a successful team (Ford, Piccolo & Ford, 2017).
Traits of an Effective Team Leader
Strong Organizational Skills
Exceptional organizational skills are very critical to the leadership of a team. This is because, with these skills, the leaders can plan and strategize the team’s objectives which build a head start to perform optimally (Bateman, Snell & Konopaske, 2017). Also, strong organizational skills imply that a team leader can put the systems in order, and therefore, there is minimal disorganization.
Excellent Communication Skills
Excellent verbal and written skills are utterly essential in team leadership. Badrov and Jurković (2017) indicated that effective communication skills are critical in transferring information, decision-making and problem-solving. Weak communication skills imply that these functions may be crippled.
Ensuring that Team Leaders Exhibit Effective Leadership
Offering extensive training
Based on empirical research, training is one of the most effective ways to help people acquire new skills and sharpen their existing ones (Bateman, Snell & Konopaske, 2017). As such, organizations need to ensure that team leaders undergo the necessary training before taking on new roles. In doing so, the chances of a leader exhibiting undesired traits are significantly reduced.
Team members’ feedback
Although it may be quite informal, obtaining what team members have to say about their team leader’s traits and letting the team leaders know about it may help in keeping them on their toe. They will be cautious when they know that how they conduct themselves eventually reach higher authorities.
Modes of Communicating in a Team
Meetings
A physical or virtual meeting is one of the essential modes of communicating effectively in a team setting. When a team meets, it gets a chance to reflect on the progress and set the desired morale (Bateman, Snell & Konopaske, 2017). Besides, meeting together strengthens cohesiveness in a team and development of a culture of open communication and shared values.
Emailing
Written information has a wide array of merits. Firstly, it offers a chance for referral and follows up (Bateman, Snell & Konopaske, 2017). Secondly, it is very cheap and less-time consuming because one draft is duplicated and shared among all the targeted group without any alterations. Finally, the recipient gets ample time to think and analyze information critically before acting or reacting. This method is efficient in a team in the sense that when people analyze information critically, chances to make mistakes are minimized.
Conclusion
The main aim of forming a team in an organization is to propel the organization ion the desired trajectory, which is mainly maximizing the profits. There are various ways that organizations can adopt to develop effective teams which include: making the hiring process a team effort and not a competition, understanding personalities and building trust and respect. There are various ways of developing the desired team leaders, which include extensive training and using members’ feedback to keep the leaders on the right track.
References
Bateman, T. S., Snell, S. A., & Konopaske, R. (2017). Management: Leading & Collaborating in a Competitive World. McGraw-Hill.
Badrov, T., & Jurković, I. (2017). Attitudes of Nursing Students toward the Importance of Communication Skills in the English Language. Časopis za primijenjene zdravstvene znanosti, 3(2), 265-271.
Ford, R. C., Piccolo, R. F., & Ford, L. R. (2017). Strategies for building effective virtual teams: Trust is key. Business Horizons, 60(1), 25-34.
Rao, M. S. (2016). Collaborate to build effective teams to achieve organizational excellence and effectiveness. Industrial and Commercial Training, 48(1), 24-28.