1. Why does the team exist?

• The purpose
• Key clients/stakeholders
• The problem or need the team is attempting to address

2. What will the team accomplish/deliver?

• Scope of responsibility
• Major goals
• Key milestones and time lines

3. How will the team operate?

• Team members
• Roles and responsibilities
• Decision-making and authority
• Resources required
• Team norms

One of the big problems teams face is confusion. Much of that confusion can be prevented if the team develops a good charter from the onset. If the team is already established, it doesn’t hurt to go back and tighten up the charter. Does yours need a tune-up?

Using workplace teams to solve problems and manage processes has become common. Although some teams deliver amazing results, many bog down in a quagmire of unresolved issues.

If team-based problem-solving strategies are going to be successful in your organization, you need to focus some of your energy on team building. When I work with groups on team building, I often focus a good part of my work on helping the group answer the following six questions.

1. What is the team’s purpose? It should be easy to see and important to the organization. Measurable performance objectives help determine whether the team’s purpose justifies the resources it will consume. As a quick test, do an informal query with you staff. Ask each person what the purpose of your group is and see what they have to say. If you are lucky, most will be thinking the same thing that you are.
2. What is the team’s plan for accomplishing its work? A successful team has a plan for reaching its objectives. It also has the discipline required for sticking to the plan and the wisdom to know when the team needs to flex with a changing situation. If you’ve been doing the same work for a long time, chances are good that your team is running on autopilot. It might be time to take a fresh look at the way the work gets done and see if it needs to change.
3. What resources does the team need to complete its work? Teams without the resources to do the job, die slow and painful deaths. Great teams know what resources they need and make sure they have access to them when they are needed. These days I hear story after story of teams that have way too much to do and not enough people to get it done. Morale tanks, and this leads to an even larger gap between demand and capability.
4. What is expected from each team member? The organization has expectations for the team. Team members have expectations of one another. Effective teams talk about these expectations to make sure everyone clearly understands what is expected and agrees to accept responsibility for delivering on those expectations. Most infighting in a team results when one member doesn’t meet the expectations of another. The problem is that often the people doing the disappointing had no clue about the expectations in the first place.
5. How does the team make decisions? Teams are faced with hundreds of decisions. A successful team has figured out how to best make decisions and is consistent in making them. Throughout the decision-making process, the team skillfully manages the conflicts that inevitably arise. While deciding how to decide might seem like a waste of time, it is critical to a team’s ability to succeed.
6. How do team members feel about being a part of this team? It is exciting to be part of a successful team. If the team lacks this energy and excitement, it is wise to go back and reexamine the answers to the first five questions.

Although there are more questions that could help predict a team’s probability for success, these six will start the team off in the right direction. If team members seriously consider the answers to these questions, they will find many improvement opportunities that have the potential of helping the team reach performance levels beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

Let’s face it. Sometimes people just plain don’t like each other. So what’s a team leader to do in these situations?

People usually attribute this sort of problem to strong personalities.  Labeling the problem this way seems to be a justification for not doing anything about it.  After all, one cannot change the basic nature of another person, right?

There are actions you can take as the team leader.  Here are four.

• Establish the Ideal. Engage the group in a conversation about what kind of team they want to have.  Get them talking about behaviors that will make the team more successful and interesting for the members.  Groups have their own unique cultures.  Your job is to get the group to compare the culture they have to the one they want.
• Clear up fuzzy leadership. Sometimes people clash in the absence of clear leadership.  Perhaps these two are positioning for power and control of the team.  Assuming neither is right for the role, make it clear who is in charge.
• Try the obvious. While it may be the least attractive option, it is probably the most effective.  Talk with these people individually or together.  Let them know that their behaviors are affecting the team.  Work with them to understand the underlying problems and together develop solutions that will address the conflicts.
• Clean house. As a last resort, the leader may want to remove one or both of these people from the team.  If your gut is telling you that they are significantly cutting into productivity and effectiveness, and you have tried everything you and others can think of doing, this becomes a reasonable action.  Take it.

There is nothing more challenging than leading a team that’s lost its energy or one that never had any in the first place. Team members are going through the motions, but without enthusiasm. If this is your team, and you are fantasizing about new team members; fight off your desire to give up on them, roll up your sleeves, and tackle the problem.

Solving problems always starts with figuring out the root cause. There are usually multiple suspects that need to be considered. One that is often on the list is boredom. Team members lack energy because they are bored.

If it turns out that your team is bored, first figure out which of the following are missing and then do something about it:  A compelling goal, meaningful incentives, variety, or fun.

• Revisit the goal. Decide together what it is that the group is working to achieve.  If it turns out that the goal is simply to complete the work that flows through the department, you may need to step back and ask questions about how to make that more meaningful.  A compelling goal has importance and is challenging.  Let the whole group participate in creating it.
• Make sure the incentives are in place. People will do their job for a paycheck.  But to get them doing it with enthusiasm and energy requires something more.  Everyone is motivated in different ways.  Find out what matters to people and build more of those types of incentives into your work plan.
• Add variety. Routine is, well…routine.  The same thing over and over again dulls even the most enthusiastic among us.  The challenge is to mix it up a bit.  New goals, new incentives, changing roles, or a new process can all help breathe new life into a stale team.
• Create some fun. Just because they call it work, does not mean it has to be overly serious.  Fun events can strengthen relationships, recharge batteries, and help people renew their commitment to the work.  The easier approach is to find ways to add fun into the daily routine.

Team members have moments of boredom, but if that’s the prevailing feeling on the team, it’s time to take action. Now do it.

When it comes to life at work, most people don’t like conflict. It makes them uncomfortable and increases their stress. If given a choice they will avoid it. What they don’t realize is that by trying to avoid it, they are only missing an opportunity to do something positive about it.

Here’s the organizational leader’s challenge. Help employees understand that the potential pay-offs of conflict are innovation, personal growth and stronger relationships. Prove to them that the rewards outweigh the costs.

One way of doing this is by making your expectations clear and modeling them through your actions. Develop, communicate, and reinforce a set of conflict standards that everyone can follow. Imagine the impact on your organization if these statements were true:

• We address problems immediately and directly.
• We understand others before trying to make them understand us.
• We balance being kind with being right.

Another way to stress the importance of resolving conflicts is to give people the skills they need for doing so. Put all employees through conflict management training upon joining the organization, and supplement with regular follow-up. Employees will feel more comfortable with conflict if they are confident in their ability to deal with it.

If you want an organization that effectively addresses conflict, you’ll need to begin by changing employee attitudes about it.

Many argue that the ultimate measure of a senior leadership team’s success should be the organization’s performance results. And yet there are companies that due to favorable market conditions do quite well in spite of their dysfunctional leadership teams. Imagine what could happen if the team at the top was able to get its act together.

Is your leadership team effective? To find out assess the team against the following nine characteristics.

1. A meaningful purpose: There is a clear and compelling reason to be working together. Most executive teams are comprised of members with distinctly different responsibilities (IT, Finance, Sales, Ops, etc.) One could argue the CEO should be the glue that coordinates the activities, but everyone’s primary concern should be his/her areas of responsibility. In high-performance teams a commitment to the team’s purpose should be at least as important as the commitment to the purpose for the area each member leads.
2. Shared goals: The team needs to be focused on a set of outcomes which all members are committed to achieving and which require contribution by everyone. If it’s truly a team goal, everyone should feel equally responsible for its achievement. These are not necessarily the same as the company’s goals.
3. The right mix of people: The team’s members have a complementary set of skills, experiences, and styles necessary for fulfilling the needed roles and responsibilities. People know a lot about each other; including strengths, weaknesses, preferences and aversions and use this knowledge to create synergy. If someone’s on the team, everyone believes he/she should be on the team. There’s a sense of equality among all the players.
4. Strong interpersonal relationships: People can be themselves because they genuinely like each other and will do what they can to look out for and support their teammates. Members trust each other and are trustworthy. The cohesiveness of the team is obvious to people outside the group.
5. Helpful operating principles: These are agreed upon ways of pursuing goals and working together. These might include a shared set of values, processes for making decisions, ways of communicating within the team and to other employees, tracking activities, and many others.
6. Problem-solving: The team can recognize when a problem exists, analyze it, identify alternatives, and work through conflicts. Once the decision is made, everyone commits to supporting it. Often this is best demonstrated by someone’s willingness to raise a thorny issue in the first place and in the members’ willingness to fully engage in finding a resolution to the problem.
7. High levels of candor: People say what needs saying in a direct and respectful manner. Members are receptive to hearing tough messages without becoming defensive. Heated discussions are not viewed as a problem, but rather a positive activity as long as the discussion stays focused on issues/behaviors rather than on personalities.
8. Mutual accountability: Members hold themselves and others to the commitments they have made. While the CEO often has the primary responsibility for holding his/her team accountable for keeping their promises, in a high-performance team this activity is shared by all.
9. Measure the important. Whether it’s progress on key initiatives, performance results, or even behaviors expected of each other; effective teams track those things that are most important to their success and take action when things are not meeting expectations.

Okay, you’ve formed your opinion. But what does everyone else think? And even more importantly, what should you do about it?

I’d suggest carving out time at your executive team’s next off-site to do some work on the idea of becoming a high-performance team. We can help. Whether you’d like us to structure and lead this discussion or facilitate the whole meeting, we’d be happy to offer our experience.

It’s easy to feel over-confident about a group you are leading or of which you are a member.  The danger in this is that the group becomes apathetic about its own effectiveness and slowly begins to decay. One day, the group finds itself to be a wreck, and nobody seems able to figure out how things became as bad as they did.

Your team doesn’t have to be perfect, but it ought to be continually working on improving performance.  This process always starts with an honest assessment of the current state of affairs.

The team’s results can serve as one effectiveness indicator. On the other hand, using results can be misleading. Not achieving goals does suggest major problems with the team; however, the converse is not necessarily true. A team might hit its goals, but may have used up far more resources than necessary to achieve that result. Not only can this show up as an immediate productivity problem, but it may show up later in the form of serious morale problems on the team, resulting in the team’s inability to achieve some future goal.

To better understand some of the process concerns that a team has, you need to ask the team members. The problem is that they probably won’t tell the leader what they really think.  No matter how strong the leader’s relationship is with each team member, people still hedge when talking with the boss about problems they are experiencing.

This is when an outside assessor can help find the issues that might be keeping a team from reaching its potential and suggest ways to turn things around. This first step need not be expensive nor time consuming. A simple online survey, compiled by a neutral party will provide the information you need to start building a team that’s great.

Want to give it a try?  Click to learn more about The TeamCheck Assessment.

The number one objection I hear when suggesting that people be more inclusive during decision making is that it takes too long. Whether this is true depends on the time span you are measuring. Let me explain.

Imagine you are the new supervisor of a 10-person work group. On any given day there are four activities that need to be staffed. For years the previous supervisor started each shift by making daily assignments. The assignment strategy was to mix it up. That way every person would know how to do every job.

With a couple months under your belt, you’ve started to notice that some people perform much better on certain activities than on others. You are thinking about making assignments more or less permanent to take full advantage of these performance differences. Should you simply announce the new plan or involve everyone in the decision? You really want to go with the former because it will be much quicker; or will it? Let’s examine how the two options would likely work out.

• Option A: You’ve been thinking about it. You know what you want to do. Announce it to the team. Done. From start to finish this is a relatively short process.
• Option B: You introduce your ideas to the group. Together you discuss it. Some like the idea. Others don’t. You give them time to think about it. You talk about it some more. Make a few modifications, and eventually everyone agrees. From start to finish this is a relatively long process.

If time is your concern, Option A is the clear winner, right? Not so fast. In both cases the place you start the clock is clear. But where do you stop it? If you think it is when the decision is known, then Option A does win. But that’s not the important end point. Instead, it should be when the decision is fully implemented and working well. If you stop the time at this point, the winner usually changes. Here’s why.

In Option A, you make a really quick decision, but people don’t like it. They weren’t asked for their opinions and don’t think it’s the best approach. While you can force them to do the new assignments, you won’t get the better productivity that you had hoped for because your employees are showing you that they have some control too. Foot dragging, sabotage, low morale and every imaginable bad reaction leads to a very long time before you can eventually stop the clock and say that the plan has been successful implemented. And in some cases that end point never arrives.

In Option B, there is more time in decision making, but once you sort things out, full implementation happens much more quickly. Why? Because people had their say. They are bought into the solution, and want to make it work. It is, after all, their solution.

Working through tough decisions as a group doesn’t necessarily take more time, especially if you measure the right end point.

These aren’t the kind of words one might expect to hear from a football coach. Whenever I use the word love in the business environment, the push-back is immediate and forceful. I always give in, and the group works to find a more acceptable word. Usually they are more comfortable with something like respect.

Let’s give Vince the benefit of the doubt and assume for a moment he was right. He said love so he must have meant love. How did he know whether or not his players loved each other? The same way we do. He observed their behaviors. These are my guesses about the behaviors he may have seen.

• They brought out the best in each other.
• They helped each person meet his needs.
• They went out of their way to help and support one another.
• They acted genuinely happy when one of their teammates did well.
• They showed a teammate who failed that he was still a valued member of the team.
• They told each other the truth.
• They fiercely defended each other against any and all threats.
• They argued but knew that the relationships would be just fine.
• They shared the pain of their teammates.
• They selflessly gave what they had to each other.

And the list goes on and on. How about your team? How do the members treat each other? Does it look and feel like love?

Team leaders can’t mandate love. Rather they can foster an environment where is flourishes on its own. Most work teams I know aren’t anywhere near this ideal. Most probably never will be. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing. Imagine what your team could achieve if the members loved each other.

Photo by jimbowen0306

In my world view, most people are half-way decent human beings. They try to do what’s right and get along with others as they go about their work. Most, however, doesn’t mean all. And if you are unlucky enough to have one of the exceptions working in your department, you are well aware of the problems these folks can create.

In dealing with this issue, there are two challenges. First, you’ve got to figure out if the person really is a bad apple or is just temporarily behaving badly due to a wide range of causes that might include home life, health, or bad working conditions. If you decide the person is rotten to the core, you need to figure out what to do about it.

Identifying Toxic People

First things first. How do you know if the person really is a bad apple? You examine the evidence. In their book, The Orange Revolution, Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton offer the following behaviors you are likely to witness in a truly toxic employee:

• Constantly complain about other employees.
• Others are at the worst when this person is around.
• Attack people rather than issues.
• Have plenty to say in hallway conversations, but won’t say anything in the room when it counts.
• Extremely disagreeable.
• Words don’t match actions.
• Claims to understand own bad behaviors but never changes any of them.

Options for Dealing with Problem

If several of these behaviors describe your person, then you can be reasonably sure this isn’t a temporary problem. It’s time to act. You have several options.

1. Do nothing and hope it goes away. You shouldn’t and it won’t. Far too many leaders choose this option out of a sense of hopelessness or fear of confronting the person. This option is bad for the team, bad for you, and even bad for the person creating all the problems.
2. Coach the person. This is always a good place to start. But due to the last behavior in the indicators list, it isn’t likely to succeed. The bad apple isn’t lacking skills or dealing with some temporary difficulty. The person is choosing to behave badly, but won’t admit to the behavior or the negative impact it is having. Chances are he or she has no intentions of changing. Still, everyone deserves a chance to get back on track. The trick is not letting this go on too long.
3. Enforce the expected behaviors. Your organization already has plenty of policies and behavioral expectations on the books. Hopefully, you have been clear about the behaviors you expect from members of your team. If this person violates them and hasn’t responded to coaching, enforce the rules. Use your progressive discipline process. Provide other consequences that will get the person’s attention. Sometimes people won’t change because they don’t think they have to. If you can demonstrate that bad behavior has consequences, you just might get the person’s attention.
4. Fire the bad apple. If your gut is screaming that this person is wrecking your team and you’ve already done 2 and 3, it’s time to send this person on his way. Organizations typically have a process for terminating an employee. Sometimes that process seems overwhelming. It doesn’t matter. It’s worth the effort. Work the process. You’ll be glad you did and the rest of your team will be too.

Nobody wants to deal with a bad apple on the team. The reality is that they do exist. If you find yourself needing to deal with this issue, my advice is simple. Plan your approach and get on with it. Things are not going to improve unless you act.