Teamwork - Setting Expectations

Whether you work remotely or whether you are working from office, team work makes the dream work. A lot many times as we lead teams we are unable to go ahead and push our expectations on targets and milestones in the right way to the teams. This in return bites us back as we are unaware. Imagine being put on a conference call or in a room with 10 people who speak 10 different languages and now you are given a task to do, how do you think it will pan out?

When we talk about teamwork there is several key attributes of a successful team, which is the commitment to processes, leadership and accountability for the work at hand. What does this mean? As a team all of them have one goal which is considered as the project or work, but each of your roles in that project has to be laid out. Each member of the team has to be committed, held responsible and accountable for the outcome of their part to play in the bigger picture. Here are two main points that must be kept in mind when going forward to setting the expectations:

• Team members must be aware of the importance of each person’s role in the team not only their own roles but the one's that they are working with.
• Work allocation and the process used by the team to plan, track the timing and the quality of required tasks must be kept transparent at all times.

Let me walk you through why, when the team works together they each know what the final desire is but when starting no one is aware where to start. This is where a proper role is defined hence a starting point of the work demanded from that individual. Even if an individual is multi faceted, and they give insights in a broader perspective they will not be given the complete project to finish by themselves and would require help. When defining roles they will return back to their target and milestones instead of working all around the place, resulting in inefficiency.

Now, work allocation and the process in place is important because the team will understand the metric which is being followed to monitor progress and development. Again, this focuses a spotlight on their work and providing "quality work" rather than "quantity and no quality". Transparency should be maintained at all times to pick up from where you left off, or even to check overall progression of the team. As a leader chipping into meetings and just getting email updates wont work because it will result to "more talk less work" i.e: imagine building a house without a floor plan.

Finally, I would like to sum this all by saying the team leader is only a leader if he can manager, support and bring context to the differences and diversity of the team (it does not matter if this team is small or big). "People are plenty but vision is rare, leaders should direct, control and stir the ship."