Building your Team

Appointing the team members should balance between the skills required for a task and who can join the team. Don’t dream of white elephants. They are rare. However, never settle for someone who cannot do the task assigned to.

Remember to exercise the team building techniques as soon as possible with all team members. Informal chats help a lot.

Once you’ve assembled a great group of people, whether it’s in the office, inter-office, or flung around the country or the globe, your next big project will be to take that assembly and turn them into a team. Of course, natural human interaction between the members of your new team will easily get this started, but that needs to be supplemented to create a true team.

This basic team building boils down to one major thing: leadership. Your team must have solid leadership. That doesn’t mean infallible, perfect leadership; it means solid, trustworthy, and honest leadership. That last sentence should explain the very basic cornerstone of being a good leader to your new team: trustworthy and honest leadership.

Trustworthiness is usually gained over time and will happen naturally as your team members begin to learn that they can trust in you to be a good leader, to be supportive, provide direction, and most importantly that you are open to feedback. One of the best attributes of a great leader is the ability to bring on people that are smarter than you. A leader cannot do everything and so you must hire or bring together the best people to get that job done and in doing that cultivate the strongest and most beneficial contributions from the individuals in your team. Empowering team members to take charge on their assigned duties and tasks will foster a trust in you and the team that directing and micromanaging can never accomplish.

The second part of good team building comes down to honesty. If you’re honest with your team, treat them with respect, and openly admit when you’ve been wrong or chosen the wrong path, your team will believe in you. No one expects anyone else to be perfect. Your team does expect their leadership to be honest, however, or the team building will never happen because politics, fear, and distrust will get in the way. Part of being honest is recognizing when team members go above and beyond their assigned roles, if you express appreciation and recognize those individuals they will be more apt to go that extra mile again.

A leader must tread carefully with honesty, you do not want to be “brutally” honest but you also do not want to mislead or down play situations that are important to the task and team. Tact and Honesty go hand in hand, if a misstep has been made by you the leader or one of the team members you must address the misstep, but in pointing out the error you must also provide a positive means of redirection or a solution. So be honest but with a goal towards building a positive, productive, and cohesive team in mind.

Once honesty and trustworthiness are established, the rest of team building is pretty simple. From the beginning, you should be honest. Then you should establish trust by showing your team that everyone in the team is important and that each contribution is integral to the success of the team. At the same time, you should consider each team members motivations for the project, their reasons for being there, and their needs to keep them interested and active with the team project. The most successful teams are those where each member has buy in, can see the vision, and takes ownership of the intended goal.

Motivation is a huge subject all to itself, but for this section’s purpose, we’ll just say that motivation can be much more than money and benefits. Often, simple things like providing coffee at face-to-face team meetings, recognizing every day efforts as well as the outstanding ones, or just allowing time to hang out and talk once in a while, as a group, without business getting in the way will take your team miles. Work is important, getting the job done even more important, but without motivation and a cohesive team structure you will not get to the essentials without quite a few headaches along the way. When team members get to know each other on a more personal level they tend to support one another within the team a bit more, so allow some room for the banter and friendship building it will build a team for the long term.

Above all, make sure that your team building includes participation from all members of the team. Give the team purpose, some challenge, and personal freedom to allow for responsibility and accomplishment on an individual, group, and team basis. Finally, as we said before, the true center of good team building is establishing trust and being honest with your team. Do these things and you’ll have a great team in the making!

“The 'P' in 'PM' is as much about 'People Management' as it is about 'Project Management'.” - Cornelius Fichtner