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Alan
The average full-time working person will spend around 85,000 hours of their lifetime at work. If you enjoy your job and get on well with your team members, this may not seem like a chore. However, if you don’t get along with your team members and you don’t enjoy your job, each hour can feel like a lifetime. An excellent job can still feel like a burden if there’s conflict within your team. However, a bad job can be made more bearable when you have a good team behind you. So, what makes a good team?
Characteristics
There are three main characteristics to consider when planning for an effective team to thrive. These consist of atmosphere, decision making and listening.
- Atmosphere – Team members must work together to complete a professional job. If there isn’t a joint feeling of togetherness, where there is no unfair judgement, the team will fail to succeed. There must be honesty and reliability for the team to thrive and in turn the team can value each other’s working relationship. By working in unison with one another, effective teams help when a team member is facing issues. Managers and supervisors should encourage this way of working for a healthy, reliable workforce.
- Decision Making – When team members are faced with a decision-making dilemma, it is extremely important that everyone feels ‘safe’ to contribute and share their thoughts. This is where the no judgements (mentioned above) come into play. There should be no hierarchal issues in the process, and everyone must feel like their opinion is valued. By working as a team with everyone on the same level with each other, the foundations are set for free-flowing ideas to begin.
- Listening – Listening, and being listened to, is extremely important in the working environment. If a team member feels like they are not being listened to, then they will feel that their ideas aren’t important enough, and gradually, they will feel less confident to have an input in the team decision making groups. The same goes for if the team member isn’t listening to someone else’s input in the group. Some personalities may clash in the team, sometimes these can be unavoidable, so it’s extremely important that everyone knows that they must let everyone have their say. For example, a certain team member may get extremely excited when putting their point across, this may drown out some other team members voices, as the team member may seem like they have taken over the whole meeting. In this case, rules would need to be put into place to ensure everyone has their say. Some teams benefit from training days that incorporate team building, people skills and effective communication techniques, to make people aware of their strengths and weaknesses when communicating as part of a team. This way they can see that by working together and valuing each other’s input into the work environment, everyone in the team will feel that they are able to contribute their input and not be judged or discriminated against for doing so.
Team Structure
Team structure is necessary so that everyone is clear on what is expected of them. There are many types of team structures, however for the purpose of this post I will be concentrating on – Improvement Teams; Project Teams and Task Teams.
- Improvement Teams – This type of Team structure is target driven, such as social services or doctors and nurses. Everyone in the team knows what the target needs to be, and they all work together to make sure they meet that target. An example of this is, before I became a web developer, I was a qualified social worker and worked for a brief time in a Social Services Care Management department at my local authority. My job was to take vulnerable adult referrals from the system and carry out an assessment of their needs. My overall target was to make sure that all their needs, physical and mental, would be met and that they lived in a safe environment. If I felt that the service user needed safeguarding, I would put in a referral to the local safeguarding team and liaise with them consistently until we found a way forward. By doing so, we helped to improve the service users’ life.
- Project Teams – This type of team structure recognises where there is a gap in services and tries to bridge that gap to make sure people’s needs are met. They may work for a certain project or across various projects to supply the support necessary to ensure they have everything they need to be able to supply these resources. For example, one of my social care jobs involved working in a project at the Charity Mind. Mind works to help people deal with mental health issues. Among other things, Mind implements projects for people with mental illness to take part in. These projects are run by the service users and the workers are seen as a lending hand for advice or a chat and make beverages. This is not target driven as such, as there is no ‘fix’, but it does strive to give them some independence, allow their voices to be heard and give the service user something to become involved in. The project team would usually consist of 2-3 workers per project and various projects would be run at the same time in different environments. If one project team thought that another project (that was run by the organisation) would help a service user that was in their project, then, with the service users’ consent, they could put in a request for them to join that project too.
- Task Teams – This type of team structure consists of a team working together on the same project for a limited amount of time. For example, as mentioned above with regards to working for the local authority, sometimes we would need to put in a referral to a Safeguarding team to assess our service user who we believed needed safeguarding. Having put the referral in, we would then need to liaise closely with each other until we found a safe way forward for the service user. Following our successful intervention with the safeguarding team, the two teams would then part ways and we would need to continue our normal social care assessment.
Difficult Times
How can lean management be brought into effective team management though? Have you ever been at work, and someone has called in sick? Say, you’re a web developer and the graphic designer has called in sick. Did everything stop? Or were you or anyone else in your team trained for such circumstances? What if the job had been urgent? Would the customer wait until the graphic designer was back from sick leave? Or would the customer skip on by towards your competitor?
Businesses train their team members to understand their individual role, in the business, inside out. However, many businesses that implement lean management techniques may supply enough training to be able to partially cover other roles in case of absence, with a view to pencilling in a further appointment with the graphic designer when they’re back from leave. Large companies would have a few graphic designers and a few web developers etc, however smaller companies may not. Having staff that can cover each other in times of difficulty is a blessing. It shows a degree of loyalty to the customer and to the business and demonstrates a well-formed constructive working relationship.
Conflicts
Sometimes, in all teams, you will face times of conflict. For example, a new staff member may not be pulling their weight as much as the rest of the workforce. Other members of the team may be getting fed up with constantly trying to encourage them to work quicker or more productively. This is causing some bitterness in the team which should be dealt with quickly. The team leader must recognise the situation from both angles – staff are getting irate with the lack of productivity from the new staff member. However, the new staff member may not have found their feet in the company yet. Therefore, the team leader should enable the other team members to recognise that the new staff member is also part of their team and must be treated as such. So, it is important to emit a positive, honest, respectful, and open manner to ensure that the newer team member can approach all the team members, without hesitations, when in difficulty. If the team member is nervous or worried that they may look unprofessional because they don’t understand something (especially if there is already a lot of animosity within the team), they may find it helpful if other team members are able to openly share their knowledgebase. In some cases, it can be helpful for new members of staff to have the process written down for them. Because they may feel awkward asking for help so many times, if it is written down, they can revert to it when needed. It can be quite a nerve-wracking experience when you start a new job and can sometimes take a few weeks to settle in properly. When animosity comes into play in the team structure, this can lead to detrimental effects such as complete breakdown in communication resulting in the breakdown of productivity.
Taking It Back To Basics
Ok so it may seem like I’m taking it back to primary school, where we learned to make friends, be nice to each other, honest and respect each other, but these are the foundations to creating an effective team. Many of you will have this already built into your character, brilliant, you’re fab!. However, some team members still need reminding how to work in a professional, non-judgemental or stereotypical manner.
From a team leaders’ perspective, a team leader should have all those qualities that a team member should possess and more. There is nothing more off putting and unprofessional than seeing a team leader, huddled with some team members, gossiping about a member of the team. Therefore, it is paramount that a Team Leaders responsibility is to help form and maintain these effective team relationships by ensuring that everyone feels secure to ask questions and receive an honest, respectful answer to those questions. With these foundations in place, taking the example above of the new team members, a Team Leader should be able to ask the newer members whether they feel they understand the team purpose enough to be able to implement it in the working environment. If not, then they can feel comfortable enough to discuss any help they feel may be beneficial to completing their daily tasks. If they say yes that they do understand the purpose, then the Team Leader needs to ensure that all members are communicating properly, and that the newer member is able to progress in line with the other team members without compromising on quality. It can be beneficial to raise concerns in the next team meeting or if urgent bring a team meeting forward specially to discuss the matter in an informal setting. The meeting could involve team building exercises which, if successful, could be combined with future team meetings. The team meeting may raise the prospect of extra training, which should be implemented successfully.
You're Only as Good as Your Team
I’m not sure who the first person was to say this, but it has been repeated repeatedly over the years. Mainly because it’s true. Your team should be seen as an extension of you. If you have trained your team effectively, nurtured them and given them space to grow, then you have done well my friend. If you haven’t, then I suggest you start to do so, at once.
