The last thing that you want your company to be known for is fostering a toxic work environment. When it comes to employment, there are places where people want to work and places where they don’t. While salary potential and the option for career growth are major factors that impact employee satisfaction, another critical element is team dynamics. If a company creates the right culture and develops collaborative teams, then growth opportunities will be available for workers. Here’s how to ensure that your company builds and supports high performing teams.
Hire Good People
Hire people who are onboard with your company’s mission and leaders. Select employees who have the skills and knowledge that will make your company and other workers better. You can compare high performing work teams to successful sports teams. For instance, the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series in 2020 because they recruited the right players and used their abilities properly. In sports, teams send out scouts to find the best players. You may not be able to use scouts, but you can embrace the same idea.
Hire people who fit and give your team balance. You must ensure diversity as well as keep your teams the right size. A team must have enough members to manage the workload without having too many for the work that you have available.
Pay Attention to Team Dynamics
Leading teams establish clear goals and form organizational priorities. They handle their workloads and deadlines according to their goals and priorities. They trust and respect one another while celebrating their accomplishments and providing credit where it is due.
Focus on communication. Work with your members to make sure that they know how to communicate with each other effectively. A multicultural team may need to work through their differences. Allow space for this. Also, set aside time to create goals and action plans that match your company’s overall mission.
When you form high performing teams, your company is more likely to operate with greater efficiency and enjoy bigger profits.
Resolve Issues and Promote Harmony
Conflicts are a common issue within teams. People are unique, and their ideas and methods are bound to clash from time to time. Company leaders must quickly figure out the source of any issues within a team to react properly and resolve the problem.
Keep in mind that there are two kinds of conflicts that arise when people work together, which are substantive and emotional. If the problem is substantive, then it will likely involve a difference of opinion or a dispute with the overall work process. Emotional issues are personal. You can keep your company’s multicultural team working together by handling problems as soon as they appear and establishing peace.
Amy Edmondson, a Harvard professor, was the first person to recognize the idea of psychological safety. You can use this concept to build thriving teams. Psychological safety is something more than just a team environment free of bullying and harassment. It is an atmosphere where team members are inspired and encouraged to perform their best work. According to Edmondson, psychological safety is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.”
Encourage Learning
Sponsor team training to keep your employees’ skills current and to encourage personal growth. Make sure that each member of your team has the skills and tools to participate equally at work. Teams that perform at an elevated level value feedback and want to improve when they make mistakes. Search for growth opportunities by encouraging a culture that includes feedback. High-performing teams also invest in continuous employee development. This type of learning creates growth and encourages teams to continue pushing for higher achievements.
It’s important for leaders to be aware that a lot of team learning happens informally between different team members. People effectively learn this way. Establish a culture that welcomes mentorship and rewards team members who work to build up their fellow team members.
Company Pride
An important element of leading teams is that people on the team perform well for the company and themselves. They experience personal happiness when their company succeeds, and they feel proud to work there. Once people have work pride, the company is more likely to excel.
Make the Group Feel Like a Group
If a worker remains at a job where he or she is always blamed for a team’s poor work performance, it will cause the person to experience a high level of dissatisfaction. This can thwart productivity. It’s important to establish a sense of collective responsibility within all of your teams.
To develop and maintain collaborative teams, you must address team members as a group instead of singling people out. Regardless of whether a team has performed well by reaching every goal or failed to accomplish even one, be sure to keep members together as a team. If you address someone individually, you’ll only cause low morale.
You should still hold one-on-one meetings with each member of your team to talk about their individual performance.
Embrace Innovative Ideas
Leaders must develop ways to let members of their team think for themselves and apply inventive solutions to problems. When workers know that they are safe to try new things and learn different methods, you’ll benefit from them coming up with better ways to complete their tasks. Your workers know the ins and outs of their jobs. Creative employees may figure out ways to make your company operate with greater efficiency. You may be able to use their methods and adapt other teams to work better and faster too.
High-Performing Teams are Priceless
Take steps to create high performing teams by hiring good people, encouraging continuous learning and resolving team issues. To learn more, contact us at Productivity Intelligence Institute.
