Posted: Oct. 9, 2023, 7:56 a.m.
Team leaders on high-performing teams have a common goal: effective teamwork. They know the key to great team effectiveness is through the process. The best teams have good leaders who ask themselves "How does my team communicate? How do we handle mistakes? How do we handle disagreements?" They also have a plan for conflict and difference of opinions so they can work smoothly and solidly. The following six tips are a great foundation for establishing your team process to build an effective team.
Set Expectations
Mind reading should be left to the psychics. For clear, effective communication and smooth running with your team, you have to be clear about what you want and when you want it. The team has to know what the rules are: when to be there, what the finished product looks like, what the shared goal is, the specific tasks needed, what employee engagement looks like, etc.These need to be maintained through explicit and implicit means. Set the expectations with a clear understanding so that your team understands what team performance and participation should look like.
Let Mistakes Be Okay
The honest truth here: every member of the team will make a mistake, including you. Failure is a lesson. Mistakes can be learned from. Your team is going to make mistakes, so let them. If they are afraid to say anything because they worry about their performance or standing with the team, then those mistakes can spread and the worst case scenario can pan out. Usually that worst-case-scenario ends up impacting the customer. Making a safe space for your team to own up to their mistakes allows them to trust you as their leader and grow at the same time. Stress the importance of equifinality – there is more than one way to do things. When mistakes are made, find the opportunity for your entire team to learn from them rather than suffer.
Revisit Past Process
Make things less complicated. Taking a note from equifinality here: just because you have always done things in a particular way doesn’t mean that’s how you have to continue to do it that way. As an effective leader, you'll want to revisit your past process and look for parts of the process that no longer make sense or that are no longer needed. A perfect example of this comes from a story about pot roast…
One evening, a newlywed wife decides to make pot roast for her husband. She cut off both ends of the meat before putting it into the oven and her new partner asks her why. She replies, “this is the way you make pot roast.” When he asks her why cutting off the ends of the meat helped the cooking process she shrugs and says, “this is how my mother taught me.” Months later the method came up again when the newlyweds had dinner at the wife’s parents’ house.
When his mother-in-law prepped the pot roast, she cut off the ends to prep the meat. The newlywed husband asked his mother-in-law why she did that and she shrugged and said “this is just how you make pot roast. My mother taught me.” Then, one day, that same newlywed couple was at the wife’s grandmother’s house and the grandmother made pot roast. The grandmother prepped the meat with the same sauce and spices, but slid it into the baking dish whole, without cutting off the ends. Shocked, the husband asked his wife's grandmother about it. After a moment, the grandmother laughed and said, “well, when I first started making pot roast, my pan wasn’t big enough to fit the whole cut of meat so I’d cut the ends off.”
Revisiting past processes and evaluating the iterations allows for team members' strengths to be highlighted, and any inefficiencies can be outlined and tossed to the side. This leads to building a high-performance team. As a team, we need to ask ourselves “Why do we do this?” and “Do we need to do this?” If we can’t answer the “why” with a significant purpose, then we probably don’t need to do things that way. Ask yourself and your team: Is there a way to change this? Or make it better?
Note, when onboarding a new team member, this is a great opportunity to revisit process. That new teammate has their own outside experience that can bring a unique perspective to your team process, which is the best way to continue building a strong team.
Embrace Diversity and Inclusion
Diversity on any team is a strength. It is important for all teams to be diverse and inclusive, and it falls on leadership to ensure that diversity and inclusion is embraced. I want to make a note that diversity is not just about race or gender but also perspective, behavioral styles, personalities, and more. A good team is not about having the "exact right people" but rather figuring out the different perspectives and strengths of individual team members and embracing it all. While differing perspectives can lead to conflict, it’s the embracing of those differences that lends itself to growth. If the conflict is about process, ideas, positions, then you have the opportunity to learn and grow with good communication, patience, and trust.
However, if it is interpersonal conflict, that shows that the team process needs to be revisited. How can you support one another? How can you meet each other in the middle? How can you see the other side? Strong leadership skills will allow you to find different ways to meet in the middle, find common ground, and help a group of people with different ideas or different backgrounds work effectively together.
Pay Attention to Meetings
We’ve all heard the complaint: this meeting could have been an email. Meetings are a widely disliked part of work, particularly group and team work. This is because most meetings are not well planned or run, which just leads to interrupted workflow, confusion, wasted time, and/or feelings of frustration, especially over poor communication. So, pay attention to your meetings, and make the necessary changes to improve your team's process.
If you are going to have a meeting make sure at least these five things are in place:
Number one: that this meeting actually is needed. Could it be an email? A group chat? Or maybe a one-on-one sit-down?
Make sure everyone who needs to be there is actually present.
Make sure everyone has the information they need ahead of time. Share decks, share notes, share what needs to be addressed.
Create an agenda, send it out before the meeting and follow it.
End the meeting with a summary of decisions and assigned tasks and deadlines.
Designate someone to take notes and make sure those are distributed, including key takeaways and follow up tasks.
Embrace Feedback
Feedback is hard. It’s hard to give and it’s hard to get. That doesn’t make it bad. It just makes it hard. But, its also essential to the health of your team process. Feedback makes us all better and it makes our teams better. Fostering honest, clear feedback that is constructive helps us get better at all processes. A great way to start is with yourself as the leader.
Feedback actually needs to start with the manager, and it's a good idea to show your team that you area comfortable receiving constructive criticism. If the team leader embraces and asks for feedback, the team is more likely to ask for it, feel comfortable receiving it, and respect it. That means everyone on the team needs to learn how to give good feedback, whether it’s unilateral or upward feedback. Remind your team: good feedback is specific, it’s clear, it’s about behaviors not personalities, and there is a right time and place to distribute feedback.
Establishing an effective team takes time. Don’t be afraid to let the process be iterative and collaborative, and base your efforts on these six foundational tips for success. When you let your team do their best work, offer open communication and a safe space for team building, you'll yield better results.
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