If you’ve had a chance to read the first part of my blog series, Questions to Ask When Building or Structuring Your Team: Part 1, then you probably have a clearer understanding of your team vision and structure, your team members, and their roles both collectively and individually.
Now it’s time to dig a little deeper and get into the specifics of how your team works together by considering the four questions below. If you have yet to build a team, consider your ideal and how to move forward from there in the building process. If you are working with an existing team, look at these questions based on your current situation and the experiences you’ve had with your team thus far.
QUESTION 1: Are you clear on the characteristics of team relationships that most contribute to your team’s success?
Understanding how and why your team gets along is an important factor in maintaining your success as a business. Do your team members benefit from: Investing time in building relationships with one another, supporting one another in accomplishing goals, trusting and respecting one another, seeing value in their differences from one another, or finding fairness in the distribution of work and compensation? It may be none of these things, but a successful team will be able to discover how they click and why. Likewise, you should know what characteristics of your team relationships most limit your success.
This will clarify: How to capitalize on the aspects of your team that make it cohesive and limit those that do not. It can also increase your ability to resolve conflicts and inform hiring strategy moving forward.
QUESTION 2: Are you clear on the characteristics of team relationships that you believe most limit your team’s success?
In any relationship or partnership structure there will be positive elements of working together as well as negative ones. There may be team members who experience friction with one another, don’t trust one another, or who look out for what benefits them individually rather than what benefits the team overall. There is always the risk of team members feeling they are being compensated unfairly, or being denied the opportunity to do their job to their fullest capacity. All of these things can be mitigated; it is the leader’s job to take these factors into consideration throughout the hiring and training process, and in how he or she decides to lead the team.
This will clarify: Pinpointing what doesn’t work, or what causes problems, will help you understand how to manage and mitigate these factors that may be negatively affecting your team.