Getting people to work together isn’t easy, and
unfortunately many leaders skip over the basics of team building in a rush to
start achieving goals. But your actions in the first few weeks and months can
have a major impact on whether your team ultimately delivers results. What
steps should you take to set your team up for success? How do you form group
norms, establish clear goals, and create an environment where everyone feels
comfortable and motivated to contribute?
What the Experts
Say
Whether you’re taking over an existing team or starting a
new one, it’s critical to devote time and energy to establishing how you
want your team to work, not just what you want them to achieve. The first few
weeks are critical. “People form opinions pretty quickly, and these opinions
tend to be sticky,” says Michael Watkins, the cofounder of Genesis Advisers and
author of the updated The
First 90 Days. “If you don’t take time upfront to figure out how to get
the team working well, problems are always going to come up,” says Mary
Shapiro, who teaches organizational behavior at Simmons College and is the author
of the HBR
Guide to Leading Teams. “You either pay upfront or you pay later.”
Here’s how to start your team off on the right foot.
Get to know each
other
“One of your first priorities should be to get to know
your team members and to encourage them to get to better know one another,”
says Shapiro. To that end, “resist the urge to immediately start talking about
the work and the task outcome,” and focus instead on fostering camaraderie. In
practice, this may mean holding a retreat or beginning meetings with
team-building exercises. For virtual teams, it might mean starting calls by
getting updates on how each person is doing or hosting virtual happy hours or
coffee breaks. One particularly effective exercise is to have people share
their best and worst team experiences, says Shapiro. Discussing those good and
bad dynamics will help everyone get on the same page about what behavior they
want to encourage — and avoid — going forward.
Show what you
stand for
Use your initial interactions with team members as an
opportunity to showcase your values. Explain what’s behind each of your
decisions, what your priorities are, and how you will evaluate
the team’s performance, individually and collectively. Walk them through
what metrics you might use to gauge progress, so that they understand how
they’ll be evaluated and what’s expected of them. “Team members will want to
know how you define success,” says Shapiro. By communicating your vision and
values, you will show your team that you’re committed to a healthy degree of
transparency, says Watkins, and “create positive momentum around yourself in
the new role.”
Explain how you
want the team to work
You also need to explain in detail how you want the team
to work. When you have newer team members coming on board, don’t assume that
veteran team members will explain to the new recruits how meetings are supposed
to be run or the best ways to ask for help; it’s your job as a leader to set
expectations and explain processes. If you don’t make those norms clear for
everyone, you risk creating an environment where people
feel excluded, uncertain, or unwilling to contribute.
Set or clarify
goals
One of your most important tasks as a team leader is to set ambitious but achievable goals with your team’s input. Make clear what the team is working toward and how you expect it to get there. By setting these goals early on, the group’s decision making will be clearer and more efficient, and you’ll lay the framework of holding team members accountable. Many managers inherit their teams, which often means they aren’t creating new goals, but clarifying existing ones. “It’s actually rare that someone gets to come in and redefine the goals for the group in a profound way,” says Watkins. In those instances, your challenge as a manager is to reorganize roles or rethink strategies to best achieve the goals at hand.
Keep your door
open
If there’s one thing that new managers need to remember, it’s that over-communicating in the early days is preferable to the alternative. “It’s always better to start with more structure, more touch points, more check-ins at the beginning,” says Shapiro. How you do that — via big meetings, one-on-ones, email, or shared progress reports — will vary from team to team and manager to manager, but whatever the communication method, “do as much as you can,” says Shapiro. Watkins agrees: “I’ve never encountered a situation where a team member says, ‘Gosh, I wish the boss would stop communicating with me. I’m so sick of hearing from her.’ You just never hear that.”
Score an “early
win”
Identifying and solving a business problem that has a quick and dramatic impact early on shows that you can listen and get things done, says Watkins. Perhaps there is a longstanding employee frustration or an outdated work process. Maybe there is a project that you can easily fund or prioritize. Taking swift action demonstrates that “you are connecting and learning.” But most importantly, achieving an “early win” builds team momentum. “It motivates people,” says Shapiro, “and can win you goodwill you might need later if the going gets tough.”
Principles to
Remember
Do:
Be clear about what goes into your decision making and
how you’ll evaluate the team’s progress
Encourage team members to connect — better communication
early on will help avoid misunderstandings and poor results later
Look for roadblocks or grievances you can fix — it will
earn you capital and inspire the team
Don’t:
Jump into trying to accomplish the work without building
relationships with the team
Assume that new team members understand how you or others
work — take the time to explain processes and expectations.
Be afraid to communicate often early on — you can always
pull back when the team is working well
Case study #1:
When in doubt, over-communicate
Czarina Walker, the founder and CEO of InfiniEDGE
Software, had a crisis on her hands. She had recently taken over the leadership
of a combined team of engineers and creative employees for a new project. With
a deep well of experience leading technical teams, she assumed that the
minimalist management approach that had worked for her for years would also
work with this hybrid team. “I figured the non-techies had some understanding
of our technical team’s processes, and knew how we worked by virtue of shared
office osmosis,” Czarina says.
But the team dynamics floundered from the beginning. “My
technical team didn’t have a problem getting in a room and talking about what
was going well and what wasn’t,” says Czarina. But this standard tactic of
identifying improvement areas with her engineers felt like a blame game to the
new creative members. “They felt thrown into this process; it was like being
invited to a firing squad.” Resentments festered, and soon she was having
difficulty getting everyone to attend the weekly status meetings. “As a result,
the project started off the exact way you hope it never does — with a lot of
frustration and animosity,” she says.
Czarina recognized that her failure to establish
communication norms was partly to blame. She hadn’t made the purpose of the
status meetings clear, and hadn’t explained that her agenda was not aimed at
criticizing, but at getting everyone on the same page. “So I had to do
something I never had to do before: over-communicate,” Czarina says. She sat
down with both groups to go over the purpose of the meetings, and how she
expected them to be run, while addressing each groups’ concerns.
The extra work paid off. The project was completed on deadline,
and the creative team members reported that they felt the process had been a
valuable learning experience. “Even though I had to over-communicate,” Czarina
says, “it was well worth it, because the next project is going to go so much
smoother.”
Case study #2:
Build connections outside the office
For the past decade, Nate Riggs, the founder of marketing firm NR Media Group, has run a virtual office, with employees scattered across the country. But this year, after realizing the company needed a brick-and-mortar base to grow its video production unit, Nate transitioned the firm to the new Columbus, Ohio, headquarters.
Because some employees still worked remotely and others
reported to the office each day, Nate recognized that challenges and
miscommunications could arise among the group, some of whom were new employees.
So he held a team retreat in Columbus, a combination of strategy sessions,
client meet-and-greets, and after-hours social events. “The team cohesiveness
that was developed on that retreat has been amazing,” says Nate.
The team-building efforts had immediate benefits. “We
left with a lot of momentum. Our first week back, we were meeting deliverables
in about half the time that it took us before the retreat,” says Nate.
In order to maintain the energy, the team now gathers
each week in a virtual Google Hangout with a set agenda. Nate also has regular
one-on-one meetings with each team member to get status updates and reassess
goals. “We try to keep high-frequency touches with the team, but not so much
that it interferes with getting work done,” he says.
He has also encouraged the team to maintain the social
connections they established at the retreat. To mimic the banter that might
have happened around the office water cooler, employees have recently launched
a group texting thread, regularly sharing jokes, interesting news, and funny
stories with coworkers. “To me, that’s the indicator of a team culture, right?”
says Nate. “We all have something that we can laugh at together.”
Source: Harvard Business Review
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