Leadership: Team Management – Turn an Ordinary Team into a Hot Team

There is no shortage of creativity when businesses get creative with icebreakers and fun team-building exercises for team management. Everything from to scavenger hunts, community walks or runs to building with Legos. While you are spending time working on new ways to pump up your teams, the question invariably that comes up is how do you take this ordinary team and turn it into a hot team?

 

• Don’t become rule-bound: Rules, are normally intended to streamline and safeguard work. They can also hamstring your operation when common sense calls for exceptions. Don’t be so rigid reviewing annually how tasks and operations, how your business or team operate might be a good way to change things around and innovative.

 

• Don’t criticize in public: Never embarrass employees in front of the team. Actions like that will only come back to bite you. Bosses like that think they’re holding people accountable. It’s wrong, what they’re doing is fueling payback.

 

• Show you care: If you truly like your people, show them. They will enjoy helping you when it’s crunch time.

 

• Listen: Make it both a one on one, as well as in groups. Listening takes practice. It helps you correct any misinformation, relaxes barriers, increases trust and lets people feel good knowing what they do for a living makes a difference.

 

• Make it their mission: Even when a task or project is less than exciting, you can still make the work more engaging. Creating and delegating roles for each person, for example, gives people a sense of being special.

 

• Let them decide: Allowing people to control their processes, boosts morale. Just make sure those processes keep improving.

 

Bring the energy from the off-site team-building experience back to the office.

Typically off-site meetings are saddled with PowerPoint presentations, flip charts, and a couple team-building exercises. But back at work months later, what changes?  Take the time to find an off-site event that leaves your team not only energized and focused but also able to bring that energy to the workspace.

 

Know what victory looks like

 

How will you know if you’ve achieved victory? If you need to revamp and add new products, then hold an off-site event to jump-start things.  Invite designers, engineers, and marketers from the company to spend one week hashing it out, a process that normally takes years will result in meeting their goals. Having a concrete goal allows defining the line between exploring creative flights of fancy and remaining results-driven.

 

Make sure your team-building exercises can relate to solving a real-world problem and not just done for fun. Not to worry, fun and drinking festivities will always have a time and place, so don’t forget to plan for those as well.

 

During one of the Ford company’s off-site events, Carolyn Lantz, the Executive Director of Brand Imaging, gave the executives $50 each and off they went on a bus to an Old Navy store. “I instructed them, ‘You have 20 minutes to find and purchase an outfit that you must wear in the morning tomorrow. You are busy people who look for great design at a great price. Those are our (Ford’s) customers.'” The exercise was completed to make a point: Ford’s products need to be well designed, but democratically priced. —(Adapted from “Can This Off-Site Be Saved?” Cheryl Dahle, Fast Company, www.FastCompany.com)

 

Team complacency

Five strategies: Soon after a team forms, the excitement often peaks. Teammates dream of big accomplishments set big goals, and each will commit to collaboration.

But often when the initial enthusiasm begins to wane, the “spirited atmosphere” fades, and a more static routine sets in. The senior executives who attended the first few team meetings, begin to call in absent. New developments (or urgent crises!) within the business now redirect management’s focus away from the group’s activities. Some of the team members will start slacking off or immersing themselves in other projects. This invariably leaves less time for them to devote to the group as well.

 

If you begin to see this pattern unfold at your workplace, it’s time to step in and breathe new life into your team. There are five strategies that may help here:

 

Inject new blood: Begin by inviting a few high-energy types to join the team. Don’t put them in charge. They would threaten the team leader and the informal hierarchy that’s already formed should be maintained. Instead, ask them to lend their talents and revitalize the group.

 

Tape the team: Do this when you want to jolt a team to rise to a higher level. Lecturing a team to improve will often fall upon deaf ears. Making a video though of their recent meetings can show just how listless the meetings (think the team) have become.

 

 Turn your team into trainers: Maybe the solution is to form a new team. Now ask your current group to serve as an “advisory board” to it. Arrange for the tenured to coach the newbies. Encourage them to share their experiences regarding teamwork and the process to get there. Identify and isolate the kind of behaviors that create better collaboration. Creating a buddy system might be a good thing, whereby each of the “seasoned team members” mentors a team member in the new group.

 

Strip away routine: Study and identify how a tired team got to the point they are at. Add disruption to the mix by having the group meet in new places (a client’s facility, your home) and finding new ways to work together. Instead of the team breaking into the same small cliques, juggle the group so that individuals who normally don’t work closely together will have an opportunity to get to know each other better. Perhaps it may be time to rearrange the seating configuration so that now everyone’s in a circle facing each other.

 

Host an outing: Try inviting the team to join you on a weekend hike or family picnic, or on scheduled fun activities (cooking classes, escape room, chocolate making, etc.). This is a great time for participants to get to know each other with their guard down. Even if you already tried this early on, do it again now that the team has been together for a while. When the group returns to work, they’ll have a newfound camaraderie, which will translate into more trust and better teamwork.