How to Build a Powerful Team

Businesses, whether big or small, are powered by the people behind them. Its success is directly proportional to the people running it. From the top-level management to workers and support team, everyone in the organisation matters. Their skills, work ethics, and interpersonal skills translate to the performance of the company.

Building a powerful team is not as easy as filling positions with people. Nor does a great team equals to a group of experts or people with the best qualifications. Creating a power team is a combination of great leadership, great practices, and an encouraging culture.

Steps to Build a Powerful Team

Here are the fundamental steps to building a powerful team;

• Plan your team

Create the blueprint for your team. Identify the purpose of the team and establish its goals. From there, you can identify the skills required, the number of people you need, and the tools and learnings necessary. Create roles within the team, this will give you a clearer vision of the people you need to hire. Also, make a masterplan on how you will go about the hiring process. Are you going to find your managers first so that you will have somebody helping you with the planning and filling out the other positions? Are you going to hire experts and rely on their expertise or find newbies and train them in-house?

• Establish open communication lines

A team must have an open line of communications. This is important to teamwork and collaboration. It provides a channel for instruction dissemination, clarifying grey areas, and socialisation. Team members including the leader should have access to each other. Each team member needs to establish a friendly, open, and professional working relationship with each other. This will eliminate misunderstanding, foster cooperation, and enable initiatives.

• Empower employees

Team members should have autonomy in their work. The key to ultimate productivity is loving what you do and having full control of your actions. Employees are better able to reach their potential if they can make decisions. Make their own goals, and create a work structure that is not only aligned with the company policies and goals but one where employees are also comfortable working. Allow them to take risks, provide the necessary tools they need to perform their duties efficiently, and stay away from micromanagement.

• Create a culture

Make your workplace more than just a place of work. Your company culture should start with a vision and guided by the organisation’s core values. These will be the guiding principles that will set behaviours, traditions, mindset, and socialisation within the organisation. Celebrate wins and milestones, share experiences, and get to know each other. A positive, friendly, and supportive work environment foster productivity, creativity, and employee engagement.

• Set clear guidelines and expectations

Aside from company and team goals, each team member must also know his or her individual goals. What are their deliverables? Any deadlines? What’s expected of them? Most successful teams develop a set of key performance indicators to appropriately measure the level of one’s performance against set expectations. These measurements should be specific to the position, relevant, and achievable. The attached rewards will encourage everyone to push for their goals, while consequences will serve as a reminder of what is expected of them.

• Practice great leadership

Effective leadership is essential to building a powerful and successful team. Every member of the team is an accomplished and skilled individual. However, they might not perform to the fullest of their capabilities if they are not led properly.

Effective leadership includes,

• Efficient task delegation – A good leader is someone who can identify the skillset of each of the team members and match it with the tasks on hand. Task distribution is not just about giving orders and dividing the tasks on hand to everyone on the team. A good leader should be able to determine the bandwidth of the team and each of its members. A leader is also able to identify tools and training needed by the team to optimise productivity.  
• Open and clear communications – Open and clear communication lines are crucial to effective leadership. Everyone on the team is entitled to be heard and should feel comfortable speaking out. A good leader can communicate seamlessly with everyone on his or her team, practice good listening skills, and use information gathered positively.
• Transparency and flexibility – An effective leader is able to acknowledge inputs and modify rules, processes, and goals accordingly. Making a mistake is not a sign of weakness. Failure to correct one when you have the chance to is. Do not sacrifice the good of the company or the team for mere ego.
• Review and feedback – Monitoring performances keeps employees engaged and the management well-aware of the team’s performance. A periodic review of the team’s achievements and progress against the goals will help the management make necessary changes like adjusting goals, realign team members, or infuse additional resources.
• A clear vision of the goals – A good leader must have a great appreciation of the company’s goals and can communicate them with the team. He or she is not easily distracted by other factors such as corporate drama, employee conflicts, and resource constraints. Decision making and other actions should always be guided by a clear understanding of the goals.

Conclusion

A team with a common goal works the most efficiently and proficiently. This translates to collective success for the team and the organization. To build a powerful team, one should begin with comprehensive and precise team planning. This will guide you to determine the people that will make up the team. Good leadership practices, open communications, and positive work culture are essential elements to develop a productive and successful team.