Build a Successful Team

Whether you coach a sports team or manage a team at work, building a successful one can be difficult. Much of a team's success is reliant upon a person's ability to lead and manage team members effectively. To do this, you'll need the right tactics, strategies, and personality for the job. Luckily, if you select the right people, work on your leadership, and actively aim to improve the team once it's formed, you can build a winning team.

Steps

Selecting Team Members

1. Interview team members. Get to know each person and their background, experience, and abilities. Try to evaluate their temperament so that you have a full picture of who they are. Many times, people's skills are different than what's on paper, so doing a trial run with them may be effective. To do this, have a prospective team member work on a project or do a routine that's closely related to what they would be doing if they joined the team.
   • You should be able to see their abilities and get a good sense of their experience without referring to their references.
   • To learn more about interviewing skills, go to Interview Someone.
2. Choose members who have chemistry. Team members should be able to get along and build bonds. Selecting a team with chemistry involves choosing people that can compliment each other. Don't pick team members who have the same strengths and weaknesses. Before selecting anyone, think of how you're going to use your team member's talents to achieve your end goal. To make sure that people get along, select people who have similar values and goals.
   • For example, if you are developing an app, your team needs to work in cohesion to reach a desirable end result. Programmers will need to work with designers so that the app's design can also serve functional purposes.
   • A toxic personality can halt progress for the rest of the team and impede progress.
   • Team members should encourage each other to be successful and build on one another's successes.
3. Choose a diverse team. Building a diverse team allows more perspectives and introduces new and unique ideas. Make sure that you choose people from varying backgrounds, ethnicities, and perspectives. This will help your team approach problems from different viewpoints and can contribute to driving success and innovation on your team.
   • Having a diverse team enhances creativity and group problem solving.
   • Your team may also be able to achieve better unity through conflict. Conflict can make team members challenge one another which gives more perspectives on possible resolutions, removes feelings of apathy and gets people invested, and leads to making better decisions.
4. Choose team members who can get the job done. When building a team, you must ensure that your members have the right skills and experience to be successful and complete the end goal. This means selecting team members who can fulfill their responsibilities. Require team members to get references and talk to past coaches or supervisors. Get a full evaluation of a person's ability before making them a part of your team.
   • If key team members don't have the appropriate skills or experience, it could hinder a portion of your project, thus delaying progress.
5. Establish cohesive goals and values. While having a diverse team with different perspectives can drive success, it's important that all your team members can agree on your team's goals and values. When team members join, make it a point to establish the goals and values. Let team members know what their work is going towards, what the results should be, and how the team should work to achieve those goals.
   • A team without an identifiable goal can work against each other and delay progress.
   • Examples of team goals can include being more productive this quarter than the last quarter, winning a championship, or being victorious in an important match.
   • Some examples of good team values include reliability, positivity, transparency, collaboration, and tolerance.
6. Designate roles and expectations. Each member should continually strive to accomplish the team's overall goal, but should also be concentrated on a specific part of the project. While designated positions should be specific, it's also important to allow members to grow within their respective roles. Sometimes duties and responsibilities can be merged or transferred to another person more capable on the team. This requires close attention to the development and growth of individual team member skills.
   • On a sports team, this could mean designating who is on offense or defense and which role each member has on the team.
   • You may need to change roles or help support one role on the team.
   • When transferring someone out of their current role and into another process, you can say something like, "You're doing a good job, but I think you'd be better at coding than design. I'm moving you over to Eric's team because I think you'd be better suited there. What do you think?"

Being an Effective Leader

1. Determine your strengths and weaknesses. Being an effective leader means realizing where you excel and where you could use improvement. For instance, you could be excellent at pushing deadlines and motivating employees, but poor at strategic planning. Make a concerted effort each day to work on the things that you are weak on.
   • Talk to the main members of your team or team managers to get an honest evaluation of your leadership. They may see problems in your leadership style that are not apparent to you. This is known as participative feedback.
   • For instance, if your weakness is organizing, take at least an hour each day to organize your space.
   • If you are poor at communicating and motivating, search for local workshops that can help you or talk to other managers and team leaders that you know for strategies.
   • If your project is falling behind or your team is failing, you must take a step back, and self-assesses if you're a good leader.
2. Build respect and trust on the team. Being the leader does not mean that all the members will immediately like or respect you. Many times you must gain their trust and admiration with your knowledge, experience, and ability to settle conflict within the team. Get respect from your team members by showing your value and expertise. Resolve issues quickly and be knowledgeable in all aspects of what the team is doing.
   • A good leader will help fill in the gaps when the team is running behind.
   • Be sure to set the example on the team. If you have bad habits, chances are your team will replicate your behavior.
3. Improve your communication. As the leader of the team, you'll need to communicate to each member efficiently and clearly. Encourage transparency so that your team members tell the truth, then partake in active listening. Stop and actually listen to what team members have to say. They could be pointing out something that you've missed or they could shed light on things from their perspective.
   • Using silence as a communication tool will often have team members revealing much more than they originally intended about their feelings. Instead of talking, be silent and see what they have to say.
   • Internalize what your team members are telling you and think of solutions to their concerns or comments.
   • Talk to people in your team and keep regular communication with them.
   • Get to know members' habits and tendencies so that you can use it to the team's advantage.
   • Knowing your members will also help you guide their development.
4. Motivate your team. Drive your team towards success by giving them the encouragement that they need to do well. Motivation can come in the form of being inspired by your abilities, or by being rewarded for good work. Lead by example and show them that you're a capable leader who cares about them. Figure out what team members value the most and use it to motivate them.
   • You can encourage someone by saying something like, "You did a great job blocking that game Darius. Keep up the good work, I'm seeing some serious improvement!"
   • Some team members want positive reinforcement while others prefer monetary incentives.
5. Set clear expectations. Your team must know what's expected of them to stay productive and work towards an end goal. Before you allow your team to start working or practicing, sit each team member down and tell them what you expect from them. You will also need to set the expectation for behavior and values within the team.
   • For instance, if you are leading a sales team you can say something like, "We all want to make sales, and it's important to meet your quotas, however, we also need to maintain integrity. Never lie or mislead customers, rather, persuade them towards making a purchase."

Improving The Team

1. Use team building exercises. Team building exercises can help improve communication between members and help solidify relationships within the team. Employ team building exercises if you find your team in constant unproductive conflict. Make sure that your team building exercises are not competitive and unify the team. Also, make sure that you do them on a weekly or monthly basis to be the most effective.
   • An example of a team building exercise is called back-to-back drawing. Two team members stand back to back as one describes a shape or picture and the other member draws it without seeing the original image. This forces team members to work together to solve a problem.
2. Encourage the team to settle problems internally. When members go to a superior about a problem or conflict, it can create distrust within the team. Instead of escalating problems, encourage the team to try to communicate with one another and solve problems by themselves. If a team member comes to you with a problem, suggest that they try to talk to the team member they are having problems with. When conflict arises and it doesn't devolve into destructive behavior it's known as constructive discord and can actually help the team.
   • You can say something like, "Eric, I appreciate you bringing this to me, but you should talk to Sharon about it first. I'm sure there's a good explanation for her actions."
   • If there is a disagreement between team members, it's good to meditate and get to the bottom of the conflict before it gets emotional or personal.
3. Have weekly team meetings. While having too many meetings can cost unnecessary time and money, weekly meetings can help bring your team together. This is particularly the case if everyone's jobs are different and members don't interact often. To have an effective meeting, make sure you create an agenda of items that you'll talk about beforehand. Restrict the session's length to be long enough to cover the essentials, and always make them goal oriented.
   • Don't get bogged down in minute details or unnecessary things.
   • If you need to speak to a member specifically about something, save it for after the meeting.
4. Coach team members who are underperforming. Take your underperforming team members aside to talk to them about their performance gap. A sign of a good leader is one that's able to identify issues in someone's working habits and come up with solutions to remedy them. Instead of dismissing the person from the team, explain the areas that you think they are underperforming in and think of tactics and strategies to improve their performance. Ask the team member if they understand what you talked about and follow it up with positive reinforcement for the things that they do well.
   • Concentrate on the areas in which the person is underperforming, not their character or personality.
   • You can say something like, "Jerry, I want to talk to you about your sales numbers. You haven't been meeting the quota for two weeks, so I'm concerned that you aren't working as efficiently as you can. I've taken a look at your call sheet and notice that you're not making as many calls as you should per day, which might explain the drop in sales. Do you think that this could be your problem?"
5. Dismiss members who violate the rules or chronically underperform. Serious misconduct like harassment, assault, or theft should are grounds for immediate dismissal. Those that chronically underperform should also be dismissed if their behavior is persistent and shows no sign of improvement. Having an underperforming member could hinder your team from reaching their goals and have an affect on the entire team. Sit the person down privately and talk to them about their performance.
   • Focus on the facts and their lackluster performance and not the individual or their personal habits.
   • You can say something like "John, there have been a number of complaints from customers about your demeanor. We've talked about the issue a couple of times, but I haven't seen any improvement. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to let you go because it's starting to interfere with the rest of the staff."
   • Before dismissing anyone, make sure that you read up on your team's bylaws or rules so that you follow the correct procedure.
   • Some companies require verbal or written warnings before a dismissal can take place.
   • If you aren't in the position to fire anyone, talk to a supervisor about the misconduct or underperformance.
   • Make sure that before you cut anyone from the team that you have a conversation with them and allow them to grow and improve.

Related Articles

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• Be a Good Player

Sources and Citations

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