The idea of working in a team-based environment can strike fear
in the heartiest and most energetic of workers. Images of
hours-long meetings slowly meandering to nowhere, deadlocked votes,
and quibbling power plays may cause your most valued employees to
run for cover.
But when you have a complex customer service challenge or
marketing campaign that needs expertise from several areas of your
company, a great team can step up to the plate and come up with a
wildly successful plan that never could've been
implemented—much less conjured—by one person alone. So
how do you create and manage successful teams?
Kristin J. Arnold has been answering that question for her
clients for years through her team-building and facilitation
consulting firm, Quality Process Consultants Inc. (http://www.qpcteam.com), and now in
her new book, Team Basics: Practical Strategies for Team
Success (QPC Press, $14.95). Read on to find out how you can
help lead your employees in successful teams.
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Entrepreneur.com: What's the difference between a
team-based environment and a traditional management structure?
Kristin J. Arnold: A traditional, fairly hierarchical
environment is where information flows up and down [from management
to employees] and where work can be done independently. But
what's happening now is information is not just orally passed
and we have technology that integrates the way people work. Things
are getting much more complex and customers are demanding products
faster with higher degrees of quality, and one person just
can't do it all. So people need to communicate across areas of
expertise, and companies are becoming more team-oriented.
There are some companies in which it still makes sense to use a
traditional approach, so I don't advocate teams being the
answer for everybody. It's a good approach when you've got
a problem or a process that's complex and interdependent. You
need people's buy-in [and commitment] in order to execute that
process. Or it might be something that's high-stakes or high
visibility that you want to be well-known within the
organization.
Entrepreneur.com: What are the characteristics of a good
team?
Arnold: I call it an extraordinary team. That's kind
of my byline. Extraordinary teams have a couple of things that are
important. The first is that the team has to have clear goals. What
makes a team different from just a group of people in a room is
that when a team meets in a room together or comes together
virtually, it's to accomplish a specific goal. A
well-functioning team, an extraordinary team, knows what that goal
is, both in the long term as well as the short term.
Another facet of an extraordinary team is something I call
"shared roles." The team isn't just dependant on one
person; everyone takes responsibility for being in the team, for
sharing the team functions, for helping each other without being
asked, for offering help. I also believe in open and clear
communication, from both the speaker's side and the
listener's side, and in providing feedback. You also need to
create an environment that allows for participation and where
people can say what needs to be said.
Another facet of extraordinary teamwork is what I call effective
decision-making. Not everything has to be done in a
consensus—you know, let's hold hands and sing
"Kumbaya." Extraordinary teams use several different ways
to make decisions. If one person has all the information and the
project has a short-term fuse, then one person can make that
decision but then let everybody else know. Or maybe we use the
American standard of the democratic vote: Let's all vote by
raising our hands. There might be some issues where it's
absolutely important that there's a consensus and everyone can
live with it and support it. Or maybe it might be that we need a
unanimous decision. Or maybe sometimes the team leader or a team
member can just delegate it and say, "Here, just handle
it." So it's about using an appropriate range of
decision-making behaviors.
Another element is valuing diversity—that the team
appreciates each other's strengths and differences. People
don't look at things the same way, and that's important
because if we all looked at something the same way, why have a
team? Paralleled along with that is that conflict is managed
constructively and not shied away from. The team recognizes that
conflict is part of the process because it's a way for teams to
express and clarify issues.
The last element of teams is what I call a cooperative climate.
People on teams don't have to love each other, but they should
at least like or respect each other and recognize that they can do
better together in a team than by themselves.
Entrepreneur.com: Why is a team charter important? What
are some elements of a charter?
Arnold: Most teams really don't have a good charter.
The boss comes in and says, "Hey, why don't you go work on
XYZ," and then walks out of the room. The team scrambles
around and does some really great work and comes back to the boss
and presents what I call the "rock." The boss looks at
the rock and says, "Um, close but not quite. You're
missing this and you're missing that." Okay, then they
throw away that rock and go back to the drawing board. What a
charter does is keep the rock phenomenon from happening.
The charter is an agreement between the team leader and whoever
is chartering that team, the boss or what I call the
"champion." In really good teams, the whole team meets
with the champion to talk about how they want to set the team up
for success. What are the goals? What is the champion expecting?
What are your ideas about this? What's negotiable? What's
not negotiable? What's within our limits? How quickly do
you want this done? Who do you think should be on the team? Later
on down the line when teams are struggling, they're usually
struggling because one of these key elements wasn't addressed
in the charter. The chartering process forces people to sit down
and talk about expectations. If you charter the team effectively,
you can prevent 80 percent of your problems from happening in the
first place.
Entrepreneur.com: As a company owner, what steps should
you take to encourage a healthy team atmosphere among your
employees?
Arnold: A key step is to model team behaviors yourself.
If employees see the owner being a team player, modeling the
techniques I talk about in my book, then they'll do it just by
osmosis more than anything else.
There are also little things owners can do to really send the
signal that they care. Most people in a team want to be heard, so
owners should provide the opportunity to let the team do the
talking vs. monopolizing or dominating the conversation. Listen to
other people's ideas and build on them and not make it like
it's got to be your own [idea to be valid]. The team may go off
in a direction, and you'll say, "Well, that's not my
first choice, but it could work." So if you can could live
with it—and that's the definition of a consensus, that
everyone in the team can live with it and support it upon
implementation—then the team isn't falling back on your
decision when they can't reach a consensus. You know, we all
look to the owner and say, "Okay, what do you want?" But
you should let the team figure out, "Is this the best? Was the
owner right or was the team right?"
You also want to let the team fail sometimes. There's an
interesting archetype for American behavior in that we learn more
when we fail. Sometimes as owners—just like when our kids
learn to walk—we have to watch employees stumble from time to
time because they learn from that. [And that's OK] as long as
you go back, debrief and determine what worked well in the process
and what could be done differently, so you're supporting a
continuous improvement and feedback loop.