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January 12, 2012

Supporting Teams to Become More Effective

As a team lead, team manager or project manager your role is to support the team to be as effective as it can be – to move it from norming into performing.

Putting the 9 top tips in to practise is a good start however you will also need to enhance this with support in 4 key areas:

RESOURCES – Be it budget, time, technology or tools, you need to ensure that the team has all that is required to deliver when it needs it. This can be hard in today’s ever changing world of competing priorities but a strong manager is one who monitors resource requirements and reacts to challenges early on to minimise their impact on team effectiveness.

INFORMATION – A team can only be truly effective if it has all the information it requires to hand. As a manager you need to ensure that information related to the mission or affecting the mission is shared with the team as early as possible to ensure you do not hinder their progress.

EXPERTISE – Teams cannot always be made up of the required skills and knowledge to achieve the task. If teams lack a specific skill set, your options as a manager are to up skill team members which can take time but will support the team for longer, or supplement your team with external expertise when it may only be needed for a short period.

FEEDBACK – Implementing feedback channels not only internally within the team but also externally to the rest of the organisation is key. Allowing a team to playback its ideas and progress to the business or users it is delivering to allows for external insight and input along the way and allows the team to check it’s progress with expectations.

We have all been part of an underperforming team so it is clear that spending time on setting up and supporting your teams in the right way will deliver a more effective outcome. This sounds like a lot of extra work on a manager but by setting up and supporting teams for success in the right way you actually reduce the amount of manager intervention required in the long
run – and the amount of stress!

Posted in Communication, Facilitation, Project Management | |

January 12, 2012

9 Top Tips for Team Effectiveness

We all know the “Forming, storming, norming, performing” team development model (Bruce Tucker 1965) – Whether the team is an existing, organisationally aligned structure or a new team brought together for a project, making them as effective as possible is key to delivery – moving them from forming and storming as quickly as possible in to norming and ideally performing.

The nine top tips below should help you to work towards this.

  1. Ensure there is shared understanding of the team’s purpose or mission – Why has the team come together? If you keep the mission clear and consistent then you will maintain the focus within the team.
  2. Ensure there is shared understanding of team roles and responsibilities – some of the biggest conflicts in teams come from ill-defined roles or areas of responsibilities. Ensure all team members clearly understand their roles and responsibilities and act quickly if there are conflicts arising from duplication of efforts.
  3. Set shared objectives – SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) objectives should be set both
    individually and as a team to enable them to work towards the mission.
  4. Review your task allocation – unequal task allocation can lead to discord within the team. Take stock of all activities
    and tasks that are required of the team and make sure they are equally allocated.
  5. Understand the team’s dynamics – we are all individuals, so taking some time to understand the differences between team members and how to work together to get the most out of the team is important. There are many models out there which can be used to gain an understanding of different behavioural types – we use Insights Discovery at NineFeetTall.
  6. Create the plan and start delivering! Pull together the mission, the roles, responsibilities and objectives into a
    succinct plan of action which can be used within the team to provide clarity and also externally as an update to the business on their plans.
  7. Review progress against plan – things change! Make sure you are constantly reviewing progress against the objectives and mission, whilst always ensuring you monitor potential areas of change such as competing needs on team member’s time.
  8. Communicate and feedback – ensure the flow of communication within the team is kept open and that feedback and praise is given regularly and  in a timely manner.
  9. Have fun! Teams work best when they also have some “down time” to bond. This can be anything from a weekly coffee break catch-up to a yearly big team bonding event.  At Nine Feet Tall we have regular Knowledge Sharing sessions, quarterly Company days and twice yearly team building events such as Sailing, Fire-walking, Cookery and Skid-Pan sessions!

 

Posted in Communication, Nine Feet Tall's Nine Top Tips, Project Management | |