Seven Signs of Effective Teams

Along with branding, execution, and strategy, team-building has become one of the major focuses of corporations around the globe. As workers become more segmented, executives found team-building to be an effective way of bridging the gaps in the modern workplace. For smaller companies, team-building is only recently finding its footing. With companies growing, the ability to bring people together from various segments of the company and build a cohesive unit is paramount to ensure continued growth.

Unlike their larger counterparts, small companies do not have the resources to attend an executive training session on team-building dynamics and the characteristics of a solid, effective team. Teams today are taking the reins and becoming the standard way of doing business in this generation. With a younger, more innovative workforce working with an older, more stable generation the need to develop cohesion is critical if these generations are ever to work effectively together.

Many have read the books that take the term T.E.A.M. as an acronym to convey that Together Everyone Achieves More. As true as that statement is, it still does not tell us the characteristics or the fundamental things a team needs to embody for it to achieve the more the acronym was stating. In many business schools, especially those that use case study methods, teams are established to force people who do not know each other and would hardly bond otherwise, together for the purpose of completing projects together. In the business world, team members could come from finance, operations, technology, and product development. Each of these members would bring their knowledge and understanding to the table. And the hope is that combined they would be more effective and dynamic than as separate, disconnected individuals.

When these teams struggle they do so because of in-fighting or because time was not take to develop unity and character as a team more so than as individuals. To quell, the problem, managers and executives need to invest the time to cultivate seven traits that are essential to the success of a team.

The first trait needed for a team to be successful is buy-in by all its members. When a team is focused and everyone is on the same page their ability to excel increases dramatically. When team members see the team as 'our' and not them, a critical threshold has been passed. The buy-in factor is critical because at that point, each team member has pledged their focus and energies to a particular vision that is clear and distinct to all as well as a set of goals for all to pursue together.

The second trait of teams that excel is tolerance. When team members come together in the early stages the lack of trust creates a vacuum of insecurity and protection where each feels they have to protect what is theirs. Because everyone comes to the table with an opinion and an idea, when the team transitions to tolerating the opinions of each other, another important threshold has been passed.

The third trait of effective teams is comfort. With all of the differences that team members come to the table with, bringing them to a place of comfort with each other is vital. In interpersonal relationships, trust must be established early on for insecurity and any apprehension to be resolved. When members are reluctant to share or refuse to disclose things, this discomfort can erode the creative process the team is supposed to achieve.

Shared leadership is the fourth trait a team should have. On a successful team in the workplace, leadership is situational. That means that it is based on obstacle and knowledge needed to excel. For example, if a team was climbing a mountain. The leader should be the one with the knowledge of rock or mountain climbing not the person who has a marketing background or knows how to audit the finances.

Diversity is becoming so important in today's marketplace as the American office looks more different by the day. With that diversity of race, class, and talents team members must learn to honor and respect that differences to allow them to flourish within the team dynamic.

Another trait of successful teams is consistent reality checks. Continually members check their goals and objectives in constructive ways to motivate the team to pursue excellence in their projects. Teams that avoid auditing themselves against what they said they would accomplish are undisciplined and unlikely to ever achieve any modicum of success in an environment as skilled as the one we operate in today.

Consensus is the last trait of effective teams. While it is the goal to always have one voice on any decision there are times when that simply does not happen. When it does not, teams that have members that are able to put their displeasure aside for the majority of the team will have more success than a team where members get bitter when their ideas are rejected or do not receive the votes to be enacted.

Before a company begins a push into establishing teams in their offices, time and attention should be paid to building the teams that will eventually work together. When that does not occur, team members are absent of the foundation that is critical to success. And in this hyperactive world we live and work in, teams are easy ways to bring divergent ideas and personalities together for the express purpose of leveraging those exact qualities to paint a dynamic picture.

A team that is excelling is doing so because of the work that went into bringing them together. Do not be found guilty of marrying personalities without developing a culture with these seven characteristics.