10 Tips for Fostering Team Success

Every business has a team. Business leaders may not see individuals working everyday as a team, but each employee depends, collaborates, or reports to another employee. One’s work affects another’s work. However, it’s been proven that businesses that intentionally create and utilize teams in the workplace enjoy greater success than those whose employees work solo. 

Corporate coach, trainer, and speaker, John Maxwell once stated, “Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.” Typically the fault of having an ineffective team falls on the leader. The creation, development, nurturing, and training of a successful team begins and continues with an effective leader who knows the key steps for educating, motivating, and leading a team.

Helping Them Do What They Already Do

In a 2013 survey of more than 23,000 workers, two-thirds of employees reported that their work over the past three years required increased collaboration. The survey report, Breakthrough Performance in the New Work Environment, also showed that 57% of respondents did more work with those in other geographic locations and 60% worked with at least 10 people each day. 

Teams exist whether they are called such or not, but an intentionally organized team, with clear roles and responsibilities and a vision is much more likely to succeed than employees who are considered a team by default. To help with success for your teams, here are 10 tips for fostering a successful team in your organization:

1. Begin with Hiring the Right People

One of my favorite sayings I’ve used many times when offering advice to small businesses is, “Slow to hire, quick to fire,” meaning that if you spend three times more time, money and resources hiring an employee than most people currently spend, you will prevent many sleepless nights down the road.

The slogan works for getting the right team members too. Take your time to get, not only the most qualified person for the job, but also someone who will fit into your business culture. In a recent Forbes article, the company Kinesis, a marketing and business consultancy firm located in Portland, Oregon, is highlighted as a company who is slow to hire. The company created a hiring tool, My Dream Employee, an exercise that bridges the gap between HR, marketing, and culture. After this exercise, the company gets their employees involved in the hiring process that includes one-on-one interviews as well as meet and greet with the employees the candidate will be working with.

According to a recent Harvard Review article, in 2016 Google announced after years of analyzing interviews and data from more than 100 teams, it found that the drivers of effective team performance are the group’s average level of emotional intelligence and a high degree of communication between members. So at the sake of stating the obvious, individuals’ personalities play a significant role in determining team performance. Interview and screen appropriately. This is foundational to developing a successful team.

2. Instill a Purpose

To foster team success, the leader needs to instill a purpose into the group. Different from a vision, the purpose reveals how the company should conduct and view itself. According to a 2014 Harvard Business Review article, the vision says what the organization wishes to be like in some years’ time. For example, the Swedish company Ericsson, a provider of communications equipment, software, and services, defines its vision as being “the prime driver in an all-communicating world.”

The purpose is different though and can be motivational and philosophical as well. For example, in 1995, home furnishing store IKEA got wind that one of the factories that supplied IKEA rugs employed a twelve-year-old child labor activist Iqbal Masih who was found murdered. Upon learning the news, IKEA CEO Ingvar Kamprad took action that would bring to light its foundational purpose. The company severed ties with all factories that employed children, partnered with UNICEF to create a program to help prevent child labor, and with the World Health Organization, created a plan to vaccinate almost three hundred thousand women and children from three thousand villages to help reduce poverty brought on by illness. IKEA created a purpose understood and adopted by all employees.

3. Encourage Disruption

One of the main differences between a sports team and a business team is that on a sports team, team members speak their minds, share their opinions, and even fight. But the sports teams use these disruptors to fine-tune their talents and skills and to grow as a team. As leaders, we need to encourage open dialogue from team members and let them know that it is okay to disagree and speak their minds.

Former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns in an interview said that one of her first goals after taking over the helm of fledgling Xerox was to get rid of what she called “terminal niceness.” She said that she wanted her direct reports to be more forthcoming about their feelings when they had assembled as a team, rather than having to deal with private meetings that only created an air of secrecy and restraint among the team. The goal should be the same for all business leaders.

4. Never Rest On Your Laurels

Mary Kay Ash, the founder of mega-successful Mary Kay Products, once said that an sat-upon laurel is no good to anyone. Her point was that once a business leader experiences team success, he or she tends to take a break or back off the pedal of team development. This should never happen. As Lou Holtz once stated, “After winning, most teams become individuals; most teams become complacent.” Once your team has gelled and is working together smoothly, keep the rhythm going by continuing reinforcing these other nine points.

5. Attempt to Make the Team Diverse

A diverse team does more for the success of the team than most people know. Diversity simply means difference. In other words, you want a team of different minds, skill sets, knowledge, personalities, etc. A recent Forbes article cites that gender-diverse teams are 15% more likely to outperform non-diverse teams and ethnically diverse ones are 35% more likely to outperform.

Make an attempt today to add more diversity to your teams. It is not about quotas but about setting success targets for your teams.

6. Provide a Clear Vision

As David Sturt and Todd Nordstrom point out in their article, “5 Must-Have Attributes Of Every Successful Team,” if business leaders would strive to get their employees to emulate Little League teams, their team success would be greater.

Little League teams collectively share the vision of winning a game, but they don’t freelance it. They know that in order to win, each player must know and understand their roles of the team and how it relays to the roles of the other players. This clear vision that every team member must possess doesn’t happen by osmosis. It must be communicated, disseminated, reiterated at least weekly and for some, daily.

But what is the vision? It can’t be what you or other leaders decide it should be for the organization and then simply share that wisdom with all team members. No, it must be a collaborated effort to come up with the vision. For the Little League team, the vision is shared by all because the desire for winning is already there. But how do we get everyone to embrace the same vision for our businesses?

In the article, “To Lead, Create a Shared Vision," in Harvard Business Review by legendary leadership authors, James M. Kouzes and Barry Posner found that, “Constituents (employees), want visions of the future that reflect their own aspirations. They want to hear how their dreams will come true and their hopes will be fulfilled.” To create and develop a clear business vision, encourage input from all team members. If your organization is large, have the employees form a committee representative of all departments who meet once or twice a week until that vision is hammered out and embraced by all. 

7. Break Down Barriers

It is easier than ever before to communicate with one another. Cell phone texting, emailing, using social media platforms, as well as other digital devices has brought team members in closer contact. But in order to reach the ultimate efficiency in collaboration, there must be an agreed upon system that allows the team to communicate efficiently and effectively.

Advanced technology has brought many team collaboration platforms to market including Flowdock that offers group and private chat as well as a team inbox which brings together notifications from other channels, like Twitter, Asana. Also available is Slack, a cloud-based collaboration tool that gathers all of your team communication in one place supporting open conversations between all team members.

8. Leverage Team Member Strengths

Your team members bring a variety of talents, skills, and abilities to the table. There is no getting around that some members will be stronger in some areas than others. But since your goal is to achieve collaboration and cohesiveness in the team, you will need to identify all member’s strengths and weaknesses as best you can and find a way to get those individual skills working together in harmony.

A recent Entrepreneur Magazine article suggests that you try to think of team members’ abilities as unique cogs in your team machine and visualize these cogs positioned correctly so that the machine runs smoothly. Your goal is to build a well-oiled machine that is successfully productive. And like a machine, you may have to adjust certain team member roles, tweaking the cogs if you will, to keep the machine at optimal performance.

9. Ensure Clear, Constructive Communication

According to a Fast Company article, a study by MIT’s Human Dynamic Laboratory found that good communication is essential for a team to be successful. The study uncovered some simple truths:

• Everyone on the team both talks and listens. No one dominates the conversation.
• The interactions are energetic with a lot of face-to-face communication
• People connect with one another directly and not just with or through the team leader
• Side conversations are carried on within the team
• People from time to time go outside the group and bring relevant outside information back in

The business leader should encourage open communication for the good of the team.

10. Show Appreciate for the Team and Individual Team Members

Everyone craves acknowledgement and appreciation. Take the time to simply say thank you for a job well done. That goes a lot further than most people think. It doesn’t have to be monetary thank yous, that you hand out, but those don’t hurt. For an idea of some creative ways to show appreciation, check out “55 Creative Employee Reward Ideas,” by George Dickson. 

Your recognition of the team fuels the fire for more successful team projects and inspires all to work together for the stated mission, vision, and purpose.

But Wait, There’s More

The above tips are extremely useful and have been used by successful business leaders leading teams in every industry. There continues to be studies conducted to uncover better, more efficient ways to organize, develop, and lead teams. The success of the team always starts at the top. Performance management strategies that help business leaders with team building continue to evolve and every leader would be wise to seek out new developments on a regular basis. 

In case it still hasn’t sunk in, teams don’t simply appear at work, they must be created and encouraged by a company’s leadership. In the SHRM piece titled, “What About Teams?” the author, Marjorie Derven found that team performance management requires moving from the top-down approach to goals that create a shared stake in business outcomes from multiple functions. At a minimum, team performance management needs to take into account these overlapping needs:

• Organization—Align work processes at the team level, focused on key objectives, such as efficiency, effectiveness, operational excellence, and innovation.
• Team—Include overall team process, relationships and results, equal participation, and output.
• Employee—Address individual needs to ensure that team members are fully contributing, engaged, and meeting personalized needs for development.
• Talent management—Enable organizations to understand existing trends impeding or advancing team performance to be better able to make predictions about future performance.

It is obvious that having well-tuned teams in the business positively affects the bottom line. Good teams provide good returns. But not only returns into the business coffers. According to a ScienceDirect study, of 133 factory teams found that higher levels of interpersonal sensitivity, curiosity, and emotional stability resulted in more-cohesive teams and increased prosocial behavior among team members. As a result, more-effective teams were composed of a higher number of cool-headed, inquisitive, and altruistic people, and this revolving scenario continues. 

Successful teams equal successful, happy people which equals successful teams which equals…

Johnny Duncan is a business writer and consultant with over 25 years experience helping to provide solutions to small businesses with the people side of business. Ready more insightful HR pieces at Bonusly.