Building a new team from the ground up can be a daunting task. Once you’ve found the people to form your team, you still need to get them working together, and feeling like a team. These tips will help you change a group of people sitting together into a performing team.
Establish the Purpose of the Team
A team needs a purpose. Establish a goal for the team and a roadmap of how to get there. Don’t spell out everything in minute detail (no-one wants a micro-manager), but every team needs a direction. So set the goal, set the direction, and take their advice on the details on how to get there. Think, analysis, plan and do together as a team.
Define Roles in the Team
Defining roles in the team helps to ensure that the team members are not tripping over each other performing overlapping tasks, and also to ensure that there are no gaps. Ensuring the team roles are defined and agreed reduces a lot of confusion and even conflict in the team.
Team roles can be set according to the person and their organisation role (developer, tester, business analyst, SME) or can be more fluid, with a person taking on a role when needed by the team or the process.
Help the Team Get to Know and Understand Each Other
This can be a hard topic to gain traction on, but is essential to a performing team. The team members need to get to know each other, build respect for each other, and recognise each other’s strengths. Some tools can help accelerate this – for example the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or Cliftons Strengths. You can have the team take the test and then hold a session to discuss the results. Other exercises that can help team member get to know each other can also help. But in the end, there really isn’t a true substitute for a team working together on real-world tasks.
Create a Team Working Agreement
The team should set the norms and ground rules for the team defined in a Working Agreement, and they should hold each other accountable for adhering to those norms and ground rules. The Working Agreement should be visual and prominent, i.e. on a wall in the team area so everyone is reminded of it, and can refer to it when necessary.
Some examples of team norms and ground rules could be:
- How to communicate inside and outside of meetings: Out of the many ways it is possible to communicate, which of these are preferred by the team.
- When to communicate outside of meetings: Do you have deep-thought hours defined – hours where the team members should not be disturbed so they can focus on deep thinking and harder tasks.
- Whether phones should be allowed in meetings: Phones can be a distraction, buzzing, beeping, and even scrolling can be a distraction for many in the meeting.
- One speaker at a time and all others active listening: A good rule. Everyone should be able to speak uninterrupted, and everyone should practice active listening.
- What happens if someone is consistently late to meetings? Should there be some sort of penalty for those people who are consistently late to meetings? Showing up to meetings on time is a sign of respect for the time of the other participants.
- Keeping discussions focussed on the topic (and how to park topics that need to be discussed later). It is easy to get side tracked in meetings, and conversations can go way off track. Sometimes these discussions that go off track raise topics that need to be addressed – later. So, the team should have a way to note them, park them, and deal with them later, either in another meeting, later in the same meeting, or in a private discussion after the meeting.
Define Team Goals and Metrics
If the team knows what it is working towards, they are more liking to be able to focus their energy on achieving the goal. Knowing how the team will be measured, and knowing what “success” means for the team also helps to focus the team.
The advice is that success should be attributed to the team and not individuals, and likewise rewards and recognition should also be given to the team as a whole, and not individuals.
If the team members sense that they are being compared, and are being rewarded individually, then negative and destructive behaviours can arise.
Celebrate Successes
Even early in the team’s life, little successes should be celebrated to make it one of the team’s norms. Celebrating successes shows that the team’s efforts are noticed, and are important.
Recognise and Learn From failures
Equally important, failures and mistakes should be looked at as opportunities to learn. If someone or even the whole team, makes a mistake, then take the time to establish the root cause. Be careful though, as you don’t want anyone to think they are being singled out for punishment. You want the team to embrace and learn from failures, not fear making them because they fear punishment and humiliation.
Even if it appears that an individual has made a mistake, the root cause is probably never someone in particular, but a faulty process or check that led to a person being a position where a mistake led to a failure. A failure is an opportunity to improve and ensure it won’t happen again.
Establish a Feedback Loop
Great teams constantly experiment, learn and improve. Establishing a routine for the team to meet together, examine how the team is working, and make improvements is important. In the early days of the team many ideas will come up, and over time the team will learn what works best and what doesn’t. Establish a feedback loop where the team can experiment, examine the outcome and make adjustments helps the team to constantly improve. The team will feel that they are making progress, improving, streamlining processes so they can focus on the more enjoyable aspects of their job.
Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash
