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secrets to team effectiveness in organization
It’s no secret: Great teams are the foundation of great companies. But creating a great team isn’t just about putting a bunch of all-stars in a room and letting them loose. The 2004 United States Men’s Olympic basketball team taught us there’s much more to it.
On paper, it was a dream team, comprised of some of the hottest NBA talent at the time: Lebron James, Allen Iverson, Tim Duncan, Dwayne Wade, and Carmelo Anthony. With a roster like that, winning the gold seemed like a shoo-in.
But they lost, terribly, to countries such as Puerto Rico, Lithuania, and Argentina. NBC announcer Mike Breen described what went wrong: “You saw clearly that they just weren’t playing well together and they weren’t gelling. It was a struggle right from the get go.” Even though they had so much talent on their side, they didn’t play well as a team, and it cost them the gold.
This issue isn’t limited to sports teams. Google, a company known around the globe for having some of the most effective teams in tech, spent years analyzing what makes some teams better than others for their Aristotle study. Their findings? It’s less about who’s on the team and more about how well they work together.
The LaFasto and Larson Model
Authors Frank LaFasto and Carl Larson proposed a model in 2001 called “Five Dynamics of Team Work and Collaboration.” They gathered insights from investigating 600 teams across various industries to answer the question, “What is an effective team?”
The resulting model features five layers or components that increase the likelihood of effectiveness:
- Team member: What are his or her skills and behaviors? Picking the right person is the first step.
- Team relationships: The right behavior in a team builds healthy working relationships between members.
- Team problem solving: Good team relationships make it possible to work together to solve problems.
- Team leadership: The right leadership enhances a team’s success.
- Organization environment: The right processes and company culture in an organization promote commitment from teams.
Tips to Improve Team Effectiveness in Organization
While everyone have their own opinion on the meaning of effective team, we all can agree that team member, relationship, problem solving, leadership, and environment can contribute into creating team effectiveness in organization. Here are some tips on how to improve team effectiveness:
1. Open Communication
Be open and honest to your team members in order to communicate better. In a top-down structure, this can be challenging because authority rests in the hands of senior management. That’s why you must solicit your team members’ opinions, thoughts and suggestions as often as possible. This lets them know they are a valued part of your organization and allows them to take ownership of work processes vital to your success. An open communication will help you prevent conflict, which saves your company thousands of dollars. Find out your company’s exact cost of conflict here!
2. Know Your Team Members
Knowing team members in terms of their personality and strengths can help improve communication within organization. Strong teams consists of members with different talents, skills, backgrounds and ethnicity. This allows you to take advantage of the various strengths that each team member brings to the organization, while also shoring up deficiencies. Which is why knowing each other’s strengths is important in order to leverage them the right way. Find out your teams motives and strengths here!
3. Understand Your Company’s Goal
Without a thorough understanding of your company’s goals, your team won’t pull in the same direction. You can also use the acronym SMART to ensure your goals are clear and realistic:
- S – Specific
- M – Measurable
- A – Attainable
- R – Relevant
- T – Time-Bound
4. Operate in Safe Environment
The word “safe” in this context doesn’t refer to physical safety but rather to the emotional safety that team members feel to make suggestions, give their ideas and, most importantly, fail without fearing judgment or retribution. When you create that kind of environment, your employees will be willing to go above and beyond without worrying about being ridiculed or belittled.
5. Solve Problems as a Team
You’ve heard the old saying: “There’s no ‘I’ in team.” That means strong teams must learn how to solve problems together. Leverage each other’s strengths to find solution of your problem. leader must empower team to resolve issues and arrive at a consensus without needing to participate at each problem-solving stage. Giving employees the freedom to come up with creative solutions is one of the most effective team-building strategies. It boosts morale and also increases employee “buy-in.”
6. Evaluate Performance
One of the most important elements of the team definition is evaluating performance to determine team effectiveness. This type of evaluation shouldn’t be confined solely to managerial review. It’s most effective when team members are able to self-evaluate. This provides the team with the opportunity to correct errors or, if necessary, change course.
Effective team is the foundation of every great companies. With that in mind, open communication, knowing your team, understanding company’s goal, great working environment, problem solving, and performance evaluation becomes necessary to improve team effectiveness in organization.
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