10 Tips on Improving Team Effectiveness for Your Business
Building an effective team doesn’t happen overnight. Everyone wants to think of teams as well-oiled machines. But the truth is that each team is comprised of people with their strengths, weaknesses, and ways of working and communicating.
If you want to start improving team effectiveness for your business, there are a few tips that can help you to reach your goals and help the people you work with to reach their full potential.
Becoming an effective team can be a long process. But by creating beneficial habits now, you can reach your company’s future goals as effectively as possible.
Are you ready to learn how to start improving team performance? Keep reading to see our top tips!
1. Know Your Team Members' Strengths
The most important part of developing team productivity is identifying the strengths of your team members. Before you can look at your team as a whole, you have to complete this step.
By looking at individual team members, you can find strengths that are not utilized enough! People often have skills that go beyond the role for which you hired them. You might even find that your team members have strengths you never knew about when you hired them!
2. Know Your Team Members' Blind Spots
Just as you need to know their strengths, you also need to know your team members’ weaknesses and blind spots. Once you have identified their weaknesses, you can ensure that their tasks skew more towards their strengths.
Blind spots might not necessarily be weaknesses in terms of skill level. Sometimes, a blind spot can develop from unintentionally forming a bad habit. By showing your team members their blind spots (and staying vigilant about your own), you can find ways that you have been hampering your effectiveness.
You can also provide more professional development opportunities so that your team can improve upon their weaknesses. If needed, you can identify the skills your team can’t fulfill and begin your search for an additional team member to round out the group.
3. Break the Ice!
The more your team members know and trust each other, the more they will work together as a cohesive unit.
If you don’t already, create opportunities for your team to bond beyond their work responsibilities. These opportunities can be as simple as taking 10 minutes to have a break in the afternoon where everyone can sit and chat for a few minutes.
If you want to go above and beyond, you can plan specific activities or outings that are designed to increase trust between team members. Games and activities that require team members to collaborate are a great way to develop their communication skills and develop trust while also having fun!
4. Don’t Micromanage
Your team is capable of doing their job. If they weren’t, you would not have hired them!
Sometimes the hardest part of being a leader is learning when to let go. Micromanaging stifles creativity and gives the impression that you don’t trust the team you are supposed to be leading.
Allowing your team members to work without you hovering over their shoulders will help to increase their effectiveness and their ability to solve problems they face in the workplace creatively.
Stepping back and delegating also gives you more time to work on improving your workplace, developing your leadership skills, and planning new goals for your company’s future.
5. Prioritize Communication
The easiest way to start improving team effectiveness is to prioritize communication. Everyone communicates differently. Some of your team members will be very active with their emails, while others are more likely to speak up during team meetings.
Create expectations for how often team members should be communicating with each other and with you. This is especially important if you are a remote team that no longer works in the same office.
If you don’t use one already, consider signing up for a team messaging platform or a workflow program. This can assist your team in keeping track of the tasks that need to be completed each week and allow for messaging between team members who are collaborating on a project.
6. Focus on Ownership and Accountability
Employees produce better work when they feel that they have ownership over what they are creating. This means that they get to enjoy all of their victories and are acknowledged for their hard work. Of course, this also means that they need to be held accountable when they are not reaching the expectations of leadership.
This tip ties in closely with the idea of not micromanaging. By allowing your team members to step into moments of leadership and own the decisions that are made in the workplace, you help to motivate them to produce better results for the company.
7. Grow As a Leader
The effectiveness of your team starts with you. If you are uncertain about your leadership skills, then you owe it to your team (and to yourself) to learn as much as you can about how to make the most of your leadership style.
You can read books, find a mentor, or even take leadership workshops to learn how to be the best leader you can be.
Growing as a leader means learning about your specific management style. Are you more focused on innovation and agility, process and precision, results and discipline, or teamwork and employee experience?
Learning what your focus is, and where your strengths (and blind spots) lie, can help you be as effective as possible as you lead your team.
8. Develop a Clear Path to Success
Your team can’t be effective if they don’t know what goals they are working towards. Developing a clear path to your team goals is a great way to keep everyone on track and task.
Have a meeting with your team where you identify your short-term and long-term goals. Once you have identified your goals, develop a plan to achieve them! Everyone knowing their role in that plan will make reaching your goals so much easier.
It is also important to know what kind of strategy you will use to reach your goals. Do you plan on focusing on your collaborative effort? Or would you prefer to put more energy towards exploring new systems and methods that don’t currently exist in your company?
Learn more about this strategy here.
9. Create Incentives
Human beings, as complex as we are, are also simple in a lot of ways. Habits are formed best through positive reinforcement. By integrating incentives into your systems, you can help your team members to develop the habit of being effective!
Rewarding the behaviors you find desirable and effective in the workplace doesn’t have to be extravagant or costly. Incentives can be small like earning a shorter workday on a Friday or a bag of company swag!
You can also reward your team members by acknowledging their hard work in a company newsletter. Or you can be sure to mention their name to other leaders at the company and consider them for future promotions and in-house hiring opportunities.
10. Take Note of the Work Environment
The work environment includes both the physical and emotional aspects of the office. Including some office plants, art, and comfortable furniture can go a long way towards helping your employees to feel more comfortable in the space.
We spend so much of our time at work. Making it a place that someone would like to spend their time can help them to be more productive.
The environment includes the emotional climate of the workplace as well. If your workplace fosters a toxic, overly competitive atmosphere, or doesn’t value work-life balance, then you might not be as effective as you could be.
Are You Ready to Start Improving Team Effectiveness?
At its heart, improving team effectiveness is really about making the most of the talents of the people around you so that you can all reach your goals.
The people you lead are the key to your business’s success. However, making the most of their talents can start to feel a lot like guesswork. Using data to learn more about who you are, who your team is, and what your strategy should be can take the guesswork out of your company’s growth.
If you are ready to develop a data-driven strategy to optimize your team’s talents and improve their effectiveness, head over to our Contact page to book a call with us!