Teams appear in many guises in today's organisations - people reporting to a departmental manager, temporary project teams, virtual teams, networked teams and process teams are all examples. 

What do team members have in common?  Shared goals. 

As a leader, your ‘team building' job is to enable the team - through the efforts of its individual members - to deliver against those common goals.

But it takes work, as footballers know only too well, ‘Wearing the same shirts doesn't make us a team.'

Where are we headed?

Individual team members often say they are unclear about the overall goals. ‘I just keep my head down and do my own job,' is a common response when goals are unclear.

So why create a ‘team' at all - wouldn't it still work OK if everyone was separate?

Sometimes isolated individual efforts do contribute to overall objectives, but the point of a team is the gain that comes from interaction. The real value comes from spotting when to work together and when to support individual efforts.

The team leader's job is a combination of:

• pointing the way
• clearing the way
• managing team performance
• supporting individual team members to perform as individuals - and in collaboration.

Dynamic teams need fast-track building efforts

Once, the team leader's job was to build fairly static teams, a departmental team unlikely to change greatly over months or even years. Now, many leaders are faced with building dynamic teams, where getting everyone up to speed fast is essential - and holding the team together can be a challenge.

Delivering on complex objectives is certainly a job for a team.

• Project teams - self-starters, clear objectives, milestone, close progress monitoring and understanding of the interdependencies
• Virtual teams - the right technology to develop effective working relationships over geographical distances and time zones
• Team of teams - cohesion through shared values and behaviours, driving performance through clear accountabilities

What does this mean for leaders?

Given the pace of change in most organisations, the need for temporary teams - and the increasing trend to virtualisation of the workplace - means leaders need to build teams quickly.

• Clarify - why we are here, how we will work, how we will be measured, individual accountabilities
• Connect - create a clear line of sight between the team and the rest of the organisation
• Conversation - facilitate rich conversations between team members to get things done
• Creativity - find ways to create a team buzz around doing things better

‘None of us is as smart as all of us.' Ken Blanchard

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Jacob Aldridge, over 2 years ago

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