Are you polishing humans, or preparing robots?
As a leader, cannot deny the importance of building effective teams.
Team building is one of your key responsibilities of effective leaders.
Having said that, depending on the experience and exposure, leaders find different ways and techniques for team building and many times this is related to cultural norms in a specific society.
No matter how different the techniques or the philosophy is, leadership like to see the process of team building as they key to organizational success.
Similarly, you might have different approaches towards main traits for effective teams. Some might focus on building morale; others might consider creativity and initiative as the crucial! No matter which trait is a priority, it is essential to build an effective team to ensure organizational success, and there is no organization that can afford to ignore this fact.
Generally, you start the process by hiring quality human resource. A number of organizations prefer to induct fresh graduates at the entry level jobs and groom the shining starts as managers. The rubbish is either thrown out of the lot, or given only support functions.
Once hired, you should keep a close eye on individual behaviors; watch closely who is keen and who is lean! Who wishes to support and who wishes to watch! Based on this phenomenon, you can filter out future mangers and harbor in a more sophisticated environment with rewards and acknowledgements.
These basic observations are essential and allow leaders to design their strategy. In my opinion, there are 10 key questions that you need to keep repeating in the process;
- Do you have quality human resource?
- Do you need to change focus and energies at any given time?
- Are there any issues with the team at a particular time?
- Do you need to add more resources in shape of trainings?
- As far as workload is concerned, is your team evenly balanced?
- Are you responding to their needs (in other words, taking good care of team)?
- Is your team ready to meet the challenges of modern business dynamics?
- Are you polishing humans, or preparing robots?
- Is there a proper and effective monitoring and evaluation mechanism in place?
- Is your team properly rewarded?
A number of leaders consider continuous improvement through trainings and mentoring as a major success factor in team building.
This is called The Enterprise Management Model. The model is built around an enterprise-wide continuous learning and improvement strategy. Through this strategy, companies can reap benefits of cohesiveness and integration. This model helps in building teams both in small and larger organizations.
Finally if you are keen building quality teams, you need to realize that the team capacity needs to match with the pace of rapidly changing business dynamics.
We had one day session with two of our client organizations in 2013.
Please let us know if you want to know more ….
Suresh Shah, M.D., Pathfinders Enterprise