Successful teams capitalize on individual strengths, bringing people together as a collective body for a specific purpose.
Everyone has different strengths, areas of knowledge, and experience that create our individual self. It is no wonder that building a good team is a challenge. Successful teams capitalize on individual strengths, bringing people together as a collective body for a specific purpose.
Look no further than Ziglar Training Systems for proof.
Fortune 500 companies, as well as, a pool of government, non-profit, and academic entities, spend millions with Ziglar’s company, ZTS, each year. After all, ZTS helps improve productivity, build sales, and even harmonize their staffs, utilizing individually developed corporate team building programs and workshops.
6 Tips for Building a Strong Corporate Team
1. When working with a team, it is of utmost importance that everyone understands the role of the team, why it was created, and what outcomes are expected (i.e. focus and goal of a project, or maybe, increased sales). If you do not have this basis, your team is destined to fail. Plus, it’s more beneficial for team members to understand their goals … and what will make their efforts a success.
2. Clear expectations are one of the most important components of building a good team. All team members must understand and buy into their role on the team. Understanding the authority granted to the team, the scope of their charter and what is expected from each member will help the team succeed.
3. When putting together a team, it is important to recognize each team member for their diverse skills that you expect will broaden the collective knowledge of the team. Don’t know what diverse skills your team has to offer? Ask them! On the surface, you may have picked each team member for one reason or another, but oftentimes, employees have “sleeper skills” which can be highly useful to you as well.
4. It is important that every person on the team feels that have a value to add and a purpose for being there. We all want to feel important, knowing our hard work and attention are meaningful and needed. Even a little bit of praise can go a long way.
5. The team must understand that for it to succeed there must be collaboration, and that the team must come first. Sometimes teams splinter, making management intervention necessary to keep the team working together effectively. Other means for ensuring team collaboration include staff mediation and negotiations to ensure the “greater good” for fulfilling the team’s goals.
6. While each person may have an outside interest and other alliances, it is important that they understand their job on the team is not to advocate for other purposes but to meet the goals and expectations of the team.
Some of the most effective teams also show the most respect to their teammates. This is not necessarily an easy task when dealing with diverse individuals, but through modeling the behavior you expect and setting some easy to understand ground rules for the team, it is achievable.
One of the first rules is summed up in the phrase “deliver the mail to the right address.” This means that if you have a problem with someone on the team, you need to take that problem to them directly, not by sending the message through everyone else who will listen. This is one of the most destructive behaviors for your team.
Another ground rule for successful team building is to hold each other accountable to doing their part for the corporate team. There must be appropriate recognition for excellent work and honestly taking the responsibility and consequences for poor work. Both team work and individual performance should be recognized as a benefit or a determent to the overall goals.
Copyright 2008, Teena Rose, All Rights Reserved
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