en en es en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en it en en it en ca en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en it en en it es hbs_lat fi vi en en en en en en en nl en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en sv de en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en de en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en nl en en en nds en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en de en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en ru en en en en pl en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en it en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en en hy en en en en en en en en
Building a cohesive, high-performing team is vital to business success. Below are things business leaders need to keep in mind when hiring and managing employees in order to build a successful work team.
Communication is at the center of all successful work teams. It’s what enables a team to function properly, fulfill goals and complete projects. Communication must be a core concern when building a team, so make sure each member of the group is comfortable with the communication channels or willing to learn how to use them. Provide the proper tools for communication as well, whether it’s company phones or project management software.
Team diversity doesn’t just refer to a healthy variety of cultures and personalities, but also a diverse set of skills. Diversity is important in any successful work team because it provides a wide range of views and opinions necessary to make well-informed decisions and different viewpoints on issues. Having a diverse skill set as a team will also allow for comprehensive project completion and ensure there is an expert for all the different areas of a job.
A team must be innovative in order to succeed and grow. If your team is just doing what has always been done, the results will most likely remain the same instead of constantly improving. Invest in team members who are innovative, always willing to test new ideas and excited about change and improvement.
It should go without saying that successful work teams must be comprised of responsible team members. These are the key players who are punctual, on top of their tasks, goal-oriented and can think with common sense. If a client needs something done, your team members should step up even if it means doing a little extra work or research to get it completed.
A successful work team must understand the importance of conflict resolution and be able to apply it in workplace disputes. They should be able to work past differences towards a common goal, and put aside any personal complaints they may have against each other for the job. Knowing how to resolve conflict will make it easier and more efficient for the whole team to operate cohesively, even with differences of opinion and diverse outlooks.
Some team members are able to operate in multiple departments with different sets of duties, but in order to get a project done efficiently you should implement clear roles and responsibilities–especially if there are multiple of them. You don’t have to outline every detail of someone’s job, but you should clarify the roles of the team so different team members know to take ownership of a task. For example, you can have a designated content person for social media, and another for the blog. Be sure they know who is in charge of what.
Finally, you must implement a feedback system and understand when to give praise. Feedback is important so your team members understand their strengths and weaknesses, and how to improve in the team. Praise is important so your team members understand what they are doing right, and focus there. In order to build a cohesive and successful work team, you need everyone to have a grasp of their own and their colleagues strengths and weaknesses.
What else is vital to build a successful work team? Let us know in the comments below.
Public Seminar: Building Better Teams
Tags : employee development Learning and development team building teams Teamwork work teams
Join us for a public seminar from August 12 to 13, 2015 on Building Better Teams. This workshop is designed to be an introduction to training and is suitable for anyone who has to deliver training sessions and design training programs. It’s recommended for anyone who is new to training, a subject matter expert that needs to train others or a trainer who is looking for more effective approaches to learning.
Teams have become a principle building block of successful organizations. This two-day workshop is a basic course for team leaders and team members, designed to focus on the characteristics of an effective team player and the elements of an effective team. You will leave the workshop with plans for your personal development as a team player and ideas for developing your back-home team.
A critical element of this workshop is the Profiles Performance Indicator, a DISC personality-style employee performance test that will help you understand and identify an individual’s behavioral characteristics and use this knowledge to increase job performance of employees. It will help you identify your primary team player style, help you increase your personal effectiveness in team situations, and help you effectively develop your group into a high performing team. This assessment will also provide recommendations to improve employee performance.
Participants will be able to identify improvements to team player style, better understand and appreciate team member differences, identify ways a team can become more effective, and develop action plans for their teams.
The strengths of each style
The challenges for each style
Working through the stages of team development
P8,500 plus VAT includes instruction by an expert facilitator, small group workshops, a specialized student workbook, snacks, lunch and a personalized certificate of participation.
Dr. Rosario Alzona holds a Master’s Degree in Statistics and Ph.D in Organizational Development. She is an accomplished Organizational Development professional with almost 20 years of experience in diverse workplace environments. She has varied experiences in organizational assessment, OD intervention design and implementation, learning and development and process/procedure design and development. Dr. Alzona has taken various Information Technology and OD Consultancy projects with several Consulting firms and has taught for ten years in the Graduate School of several universities and colleges in diverse topics of management and leadership. She is a frequent speaker at various seminars and workshops with topics on Leadership, Team Building, Organizational Assessment, Strategic Planning, Change Management and Appreciative Inquiry. She is a High-energy Trainer and Creative Facilitator, skilled in guiding learners through engaging breakthrough learning opportunities.
Public Seminar: Facilitation Skills
Tags : education Facilitation learning Profiles Asia Pacific seminar Teamwork training skills workshop
Train the Trainer: Facilitation Skills
There is a difference between facilitating group discussions and controlling them. How do you do the former rather than the latter? This two-day workshop January 29 and 30 will help participants develop core facilitation skills and learn the stages of team development. The workshop is recommended for trainers and facilitators and will go over the difference between facilitation, instruction and training.
The course will implement active learning to teach participants the competencies linked to effective group facilitation and some tools to make meetings easier and more productive.
Defining your role and how facilitators work
Dealing with controversial issues and divergent perspectives
Listening for common ground
The language of facilitation
Dealing with difficult dynamics
Stages of team development
Dr. Maria Vida G. Caparas holds a Master’s Degree and Ph.D., Summa Cum Laude, in Psychology. She is an Accredited Trainer of the Philippine Government with invaluable experiences in Organizational Development as a Human Resource, Training and OD practitioner. She authored three books on Psychology/HR Management namely “Psychological Assessment: Theory and Practice”, “Uses of Psychological Tests”, and “Human Resource Management” and was a Trainer Delegate of DFA-Foreign Service Institute in Italy and Singapore in 1999-2000. Dr. Caparas is a recipient of various national awards and also a professor in prestigious universities.
P9,520 includes all course materials, instruction by an expert facilitator, small group workshops, a specialized student manual, personalized certificate of participation, an eBook on facilitation skills and a complimentary ProfilesXT assessment.
10 Steps to Assembling a Formidable Team
Social Media Officer, Profiles Asia Pacific
Teams are one of the most important components of, well, everything. They are the ones who “fight the foes no single hero can withstand”, or simply the ones who come up with the best ideas and solutions.
Great teams are not all about intelligent members – they work on chemistry. You can put the smartest people together in a room but if they are all too similar, or if they don’t connect on a human level, you won’t achieve the results you need. There are a number of psychological dynamics that occur between individuals which need to be understood before you can match the right people into effective teams.
PsyBlog recently compiled various findings on the subject from the past few years, and came up with 10 exteremely insightful points that you should keep in mind when creating a team.
1. Prioritise social skills
Surely if you want to build a fantastic group, you put the smartest people in a room together? Not necessarily.
According to research conducted by Woolley et al. (2010), highly performing groups need social sensitivity.
So it’s not about putting all the biggest brains together, it’s thinking about the social dynamic. Who will listen to others? Who will share criticism constructively? Who will have an open mind? Whose will back other people up?
Since women’s social skills tend, on average, to be a little stronger than men’s, including women is one way of prioritising social skills.
Woolley et al.’s study reached the same conclusion: teams which included women did better than men-only teams.
But that doesn’t mean you should take it to the logical extreme and build women-only teams: it’s all about the mix. For example, Hoogendoorn et al. (2011) found that teams with equal gender mixes outperformed male-only and female-only groups in a business exercise.
It’s very hard for people to work together effectively if they don’t trust each other. They also have to appear trustworthy to others or it may be difficult for them to do their job.
Teams that appear more trustworthy (hopefully because they are!) have been shown to perform better when negotiating with other groups (Naquin & Kurtzberg, 2009). After all, would you do business with a team you don’t trust? Not if you can avoid it.
The problem is that in groups people perceive the trustworthiness of the group by assessing the least trustworthy member.
So, in terms of trustworthiness, one bad apple really can spoil the bunch.
If a group members don’t seem to trust each other, then perhaps it’s humour that’s missing. One study by Professor William Hampes has found that people whose sense of humour is stronger are rated more trustworthy by others (Hampes, 1999).
Similarly, when group dynamics are strong, people start joking around together and will tend to talk to each other outside work. Humour can be a signal that groups are getting along and can even help create that buzz that makes some groups so great to work in.
Humour has all sorts of benefits including reducing stress, boosting creativity, communication and team cohesiveness (Romero & Pescosolido, 2008).
5. Mix introverts and extroverts
We tend to think of the extroverts as superior ‘team-players’: they mix better, pipe up more in meetings and generally seem to be getting on with others more smoothly.
But introverts have their place as well. Introverts certainly don’t blow their own trumpets and aren’t often noticed at the outset, yet eventually the group comes to value them.
That’s what Bendersky and Shah (2012) found in their study of introverts and extroverts working together. In general, as the team evolves, extroverts do worse than people expect and introverts do better.
6. Define goals and…
One of the greatest barriers to effective team performance is pretty simple: they don’t know what the goal is.
A study of 500 managers and professionals in 30 different companies found that it was an unclear vision of the goal that was stopping them performing effectively.
7. … define roles
OK, everyone knows the goal, but do they know what they’re supposed to be doing to achieve this goal?
It seems like a pretty basic step, yet it’s frequently unclear to team-members exactly what their role is.
Unclear roles become particularly problematic when the situation changes and the team has to adapt. If the roles aren’t clear then each person doesn’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. And that’s a recipe for disaster.
8. Spread the story
For people to work together effectively they need to know what the story is in a more general sense.
Where have we come from and where are we going? It’s about more than just goals and roles, it’s about the assumptions we are using and the knowledge that we share (or don’t).
Psychologists sometimes refer to these ‘stories’ as mental models.  We construct these mental models of the world outside to help us navigate it and work out what to do next. When the mental models of groups are better aligned, they perform better.
For example, Westli et al. (2010) found that when medical staff at a trauma centre shared mental models their performance was better, over and above specific teamwork skills.
When teams make mistakes, one of the most common reasons is that they failed to communicate effectively.
In complex environments, information will often be coming from many different sources. We’re all awash in information nowadays, or maybe drowning is a better word; emails get cc’d to everyone, and who knows what’s important?
Teams that perform best clearly communicate the most important information before they’ve even been asked for it and filter out the junk.
Teams invariably benefit from good leadership. Naturally it’s about motivation, structuring tasks, analysing what needs to be done, allocating goals and so on, but it’s more than that.
The best leaders are also trying to nurture their teams by addressing some of the soft skills above. They are getting the mix of personnel right, encouraging concise communication, spreading the group’s story, using humour and building trust.
Now can you see why Marvel’s Avengers always triumph?
What do you think are the most important factors in successful teams?
In Search of a Quick Fix – Teamworking and Why It Doesn’t Always Work
Tags : Human Resources Teamwork
Guest Writer, Warwick Business School
Over the past 30 years, teamworking has become a widespread phenomenon, which has since been renowned as the panacea for organizational ailments. Still, recent studies show that teamworking does not guarantee improved performance and managers continue to struggle with creating successful teams.
Oftentimes, this is due to the fact that when searching for a quick fix, supervisors overlook the crucial factors that are largely responsible for forming viable teams– the first one being team type.
The two most popular types of teams include shopfloor teams, which are responsible for producing goods or providing services, and project teams, which produce one-time outputs like a new product or service to be marketed by the company.
When designing a team, the team type should be used as a starting point, whilst other factors such as task design, supervisory behavior, group characteristics, and organizational context should be adjusted accordingly.
To give you a better idea, below you have a couple of examples illustrating how team factors may affect shopfloor and project teams differently.
Contrary to common belief, implementing teamworking is never as simple as putting two or more people together and asking them to complete a task. It requires careful planning and constant monitoring to ensure success. The above should provide you with a basis for what to consider, the rest is up to you!
Have a look at the Profiles Performance Indicator as well, which includes a group report called Team Analysis.