Effective teamworking is seen today as the key to success in many organisations. Meredith Belbin identified the characteristics of people needed to make up a successful team.His recommendations are still used today, so if you have to build a team, his ideas may well prove useful, nearly 30 years after his great book was published.

Businesses have often been pre-occupied with the strengths of the individual; do they have the qualifications and experience to do the job effectively, and the talents to be successful in the job. What they often overlook is whether they will fit into the team environment. This pre-occupation with individual assets means they concentrate on the selection, development, training, motivation and promotion of individuals without emphasising what benefits they bring to the team as a whole.

So Belbin and his team highlighted the necessary skills and characteristics that make up successful teams. They came up with nine archetypal functions that make up an ideal team. Here they are:

- Plant: creative, imaginative, unorthodox, solves difficult problems

- Co-ordinator: mature, confident, trusting, a good chairperson, clarifies goals, promotes decision-making

- Shaper: Dynamic, outgoing, enjoys challenges and pressure, finds ways round obstacles

- Teamworker: Social, mild, perceptive, accommodating, good listener

- Completer-Finisher: Pains-taker, conscientious, anxious, delivers to exact standards

- Implementer: Disciplined, reliable, conservative, efficient, turns ideas into actions

- Resource Investigator: Extrovert, enthusiastic, communicative, explores opportunities

- Specialist: Single-minded, self-starting, dedicated, brings skills and knowledge that few others have

- Monitor-Evaluator: Sober, strategic, discerning, sees many options, makes judgements

These categories have proved to be robust over the years and are still used in business to identify team ethics. High-performing companies increasingly believe that teams rather than business units or individuals are the basic building blocks to a successful organisation.

I’d recommend you take a look at Belbin’s book (Management Teams – Why they succeed or fail, Heinemann Publishing) and identify what you are looking for from your teams.

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Training Course

(Image by Stuart Miles)

Click below for a:
Free email course “Improve your Management Skills”

When we run programs on team work, many managers comment that their people don’t act as team members, and some actively work against their colleagues because of hidden agendas or personality differences.

Many of the activities we carry out show that managers have little idea of what makes the difference between having a proper team working together in harmony, and a group of people who just happen to be working in the same department.

The truth is, people can work together without having a ‘team’ ethic. But how do you create the environment for all persons in the department to pull together and be a team? Well, let’s first see what a successful team actually does.

A successful team is one in which the team members not only achieve something worthwhile, but feel that they have contributed to and participated in a project with a purpose.

Teams create various levels of deep working relationships within them. Just because people happen to be in the same office doesn’t necessarily mean they get the best out of each other. The relationships that real teams build provide that firm foundation for growth.

Teams have an emotional connection with each other so that they all ‘stand for’ something. If you asked each team member why the team exists, would everyone come up with the same answer, or totally different ideas? This connection will either drive the performance forward or drag it down.

Real teams develop their own internal motivation and stimulus to perform. If your team are dragging their feet or bickering with each other, or showing negative signals, you have to question their real motivations for being there.

Teams build their qualities through synergistic interactions. This involves each person contributing their strengths, opinions, talents and ideas to the team and building on their ideas with each other. Knowledge is shared and made openly available at meetings and on projects.

Teams always know they need to develop, perform and improve. In real teams, they contribute to each other’s’ skills and talents, learning and researching while growing together.

Without each of these traits, people tend to be looking for reasons to stand out in teams for their own motives, and the team ethic falls apart as they just work within the group they have been assigned to.

So, work with your team to help them analyse what level they are at as a team. Get them to formulate plans to improve the connections within the team. Identify individuals who are natural team builders and help others to model their mind-sets so the group you have working with you feel they have the skills and qualities to turn themselves into a committed and special team, growing with every opportunity.

Thanks again

Sean

(Image by David Castillo Dominici)

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Training Course

Click below for a:
Free email course “Improve your Management Skills”

When you are manager of a team of people, you carry a heavy responsibility to create an environment for them to perform at their best. If you’re not getting the best out of them, ask yourself how much of the blame you personally have to accept for the results.

Are you helping your team members achieve to the level they know is possible? Do you assist them in building a team culture where they really want to contribute to its success?

Here’s my take on the steps you can implement to achieve a high-performing culture:

• Decide with the team how you are going to build a high-performance culture. Discuss with each team member what they expect from you on a day-to-day basis

• Provide clear expectations and priorities for teamwork and discuss how great team behaviour can be exhibited daily

• Help team members to gain a sense of ownership by sharing the group’s goals, such as productivity, costs, schedule, customer service, production quotas, etc. Let team members help you in tracking what is important progress measurements

• Let team members help in problem-solving. If you deal with other departments, help team members set up cross-departmental improvement groups to ascertain how each department can assist each other

• Let team members have input to agendas for team meetings and have the chance to lead the meetings at times

• If you have a new account or new project, solicit the help of team members in detailing what direction they should take to make the project a success. The more ownership they have of results, the committed they feel to making it work

• Keep lines of communication open. Include team members in plans, processes, results, challenges and project development. Let them see customer feedback. Highlight the relationships with other departments. Tell them what higher management strategies mean to them as a team. Communicate the state of the business, and the part they can play in it.

• Encourage a team ‘code of conduct’ that will develop a team ethos for working together. Ask them what they think a professional team would look like. See if you can get a short film of a Formula One pit-stop team working together. What do they need to do to produce such stunning results? How much do they rely on each other? What can they learn from the pit-stop team that would work in their situation?

• Provide good coaching sessions to each team member so that they feel part of the development of the team and can contribute to their team’s multi-skilling opportunities

If you are able to nurture your team to accept responsibility for the results they achieve, you create a culture of belief in them that will help them go from strength to strength and build a firm foundation for excellence in all they do.

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

Follow us here on Twitter

There are many obstacles to effective teamwork. If you have problems encouraging your team to work together effectively and have challenges helping people reach their full potential, here are some ideas you might want to try:

First, make sure you create clear goals for the team. Team members have to believe their journey embodies a worthwhile or important result. If they appreciate these goals, it will help them put personal concerns on the back burner in favour of team goals. Get them committed to the team’s goals and they will understand the importance of the role they play together.

Next, help them to build mutual trust. This takes a long time, but is worth it. Keep team members informed of decisions made higher up…they will appreciate being kept in the loop. Be open with your communication in all matters. Be approachable and available. Show consistency in all you do, and be dependable and honest.

Then, provide necessary support. This means providing the resources to help the team achieve their goals. If resources don’t allow them to carry out their responsibilities, how to you think theu are going to react when you ask them to up their game?

Then, Offer team development opportunities. Talk about how the team can expand in its operation. Coach and support them in their achievements. Thinks about what training people need to achieve their end goals.

Finally, create performance agreements. Expectations must be clearly determined and explicitly agreed. You can do this by foloowing these ideal steps:
1) Agree desired results. Identify what needs to be done and by when
2) Specify guidelines. This means deciding on standards of behaviour that will achieve results
3) Establish resource requirements. Make sure everyone has what they need to produce results
4) Establish standards of performance. Help people become accountable for their own results
5) Asign consequences. Let people know what the results will be through performance evaluations

Clear, mutual understandings of what you are all trying to achieve provides a common vision of desired results and creation of standards against which team members can measure their own success. Team members who buy into performance agreements usually take personal responsibility for their own performance.

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

Follow us here on Twitter

Debbie Harrington-Mackin came up with some myths about team assessments, and it would be good for you to analyse whether any of them apply to your team. Here are five of them:

1) People are the cause of all team problems, and there is nothing you can do about people.

2) More training will solve the team’s problems

3) No system is perfect and, as a team is a system, there is no point in trying to make it better as it will never achieve the level you want it to.

4) If teams aren’t working, we must be doing something wrong, as teams work in other companies.

5) We just have to bear with team problems, as teams are the only way we can structure people in today’s organisation.

The author highlighted these myths as there are many mangers who still think there are elements of truth in them. But the facts show otherwise.

If you are going to assess how your team is faring, it is wise to approach it from three different perspectives; the team results, the team manager and the team members.

Firstly, the team results. What you need to consider are the actual results versus the plan, the performance versus the objectives, how satisfied the team members are with the team and how satisfied customers are with the team.

Second, the team manager. What are the perceptions of the team members? What are the customers’ perceptions of the way the team is managed? And what is the manager’s own self-assessment of performance?

Finally, What do the team members think? What are their peers’ perceptions? What about self-assessments? And what do the customers think?

If you achieve results against all of these measurements, then the myths of team assessments can be ignored, and you can rely on the truth.

Thanks again

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Management Course

Click below for a:
FREE email course “Improve Your Management Skills”

Follow us here on Twitter