In This Chapter

Assembling a winning team means being able to lead your team through the rigors of challenging projects. It’s more than scheduling meetings, speaking to your team members, and broadcasting e-mail messages. It calls for an interpersonal connection with each member of the team.

Veteran team leaders understand, however, that their overall ability to get things done is largely dependent on the quality level of the individuals added to the team. You want to start with good people—there’s no substitute for this!

This chapter will talk about how each team is a unique entity in the universe, the members of which thrive on understanding, responsibility, autonomy, and most of all, supervision. And although a team is more than merely the sum of the individuals who comprise it, the more competent your staff members, the more competent your team.

Lo and behold, the organization where you’re employed can propel or thwart your efforts. Nurturing-type organizations enhance your ability to succeed. Such organizations have a track record for supporting teams, reward team leaders for taking appropriate risks, and have a realistic notion of what types of resources you’ll require in pursuit of your task or project. Unsupportive organizations tend to do the opposite.

When each of your team members reports to you and no one else, you have the best chance to succeed. Unfortunately, your team members may be reporting to you as well as other team leaders. You might have one staff person onboard for 60 percent of his time, another for 20 percent, and another for 100 percent.

If your staff is pulled in too many directions by responsibility for other tasks and projects and cannot offer the requisite concentration and energy that would be desirable on your project, you’ll have to make the best of the situation. Your job as team leader will be more difficult, your progress slower, and your enjoyment probably less.

In simplest terms, a team is an assembly of individuals who have been gathered together to accomplish a particular purpose. Presumably, these individuals working in unison will accomplish far more than any single individual could accomplish, and if the team is truly effective, will create a synergistic effect.

Two people working as a team should be able to accomplish much more than the sum of what each individual would accomplish on his own. A group of three should accomplish more than what three individuals working on their own would accomplish.

Different types of teams are more suited for different types of tasks. High performance teams, which can be anywhere from four, five, or six people up to as many as 12, are committed to achieving the team’s overall objectives, as well as committed to one another’s individual growth, success, and personal experience.

A real team has been described as a small group of people with complementary skills. While holding themselves mutually accountable, they are focused on a common goal or objective, and strive to work in ways that most effectively achieve their objective.

A workgroup consists of individuals who exchange information, perspectives, or procedures that help one another perform more competently in his or her area of responsibility. Members of the workgroup generally don’t share a common purpose and do not participate with one another in joint projects, at least those that would otherwise require a team approach. Nevertheless, members of a workgroup can be highly supportive of one another and offer support on a continuing basis.

As you might guess, of these three types of “team” assemblies, the high performance team has the greatest potential for synergy and superior performance in pursuit of specific accomplishments.

For the discussion hereafter, the term “team” will be used to mean two or more people who have assembled to accomplish a specific task or project.

The larger the size of your team, the more complexity. This may seem obvious, but perhaps you have never contemplated the level of complexity as one moves from, say, three to five members. On a two-person team, there’s only one connection, between you and the other person. With a three-person team, the number of connections is three, as indicated in the diagram below on the following page.

Now things start to get tricky. With a four-person team, the number of possible connections grows to six, and with five it grows to ten. And, my goodness, should you have a six-person team, the number of interpersonal connections grows to a whopping 15.

The fewer number of team members you require to accomplish what you seek to get done, the fewer connections, the less complexity, and potentially the greater harmony. Not that great things can’t be accomplished with teams of six or more people. Certainly, this happens all the time. Still, you have to pay homage to the increase in geometric complexity as more people are added to a team.

Starting at square one with you and no one else on the team, your goal is to attract or recruit the highest-quality team members you can, assign them roles and responsibilities commensurate with their skills and capabilities, and ensure that they work smoothly with one another.

If you’re given the opportunity to be able to pick your own team members, you are fortunate. You have a fighting chance of choosing staff members who have the skills and capabilities, as well as the strengths and weaknesses, that will complement other team members.

If you can choose people whom you already know, or with whom you’ve already worked, you’re way ahead of the game. Perhaps as a result of exchanging favors with individuals throughout your organization (see Chapter 23 on influencing with or without authority), you have a reasonable idea of whom you might want to select.

If people who wind up on your team are complete strangers to you, fear not. You can still achieve admirable results. Many a team assembled out of the blue, never having worked with one another, find their groove and accomplish great things.

The downside of being able to choose your own team members is that your built-in biases and prejudices will prevail. You may end up choosing people who think like you, act like you, or even talk like you. As many team managers have learned, whether you get to choose staff members or have them assigned to you, you don’t know how it’s all going to work out until you’re tested by fire.

Once you begin working on a project, put in long hours together, have numerous opportunities for cooperation or lack thereof, you then see whether or not the team has the potential to gel, meet the project challenges head on, and prevail.

Whether handpicked, assigned, or some combination of the two, team members need to get to know one another. First-time team leaders can be overly eager to tackle the tasks at hand. The longer the project, the more critical it is to devote time and effort in the early stages to forming bonds between team members, defining and clarifying roles, and simply getting to know one another as individuals. From there, communication patterns emerge. You can more easily formulate a schedule that all team members understand and follow.

Getting-to-know-you sessions allow and encourage team members to speak up, share their views, and feel at ease about being on the team. Particularly for long campaigns, it makes sense to establish an orientation plan.

The time and energy you invest in helping team members to establish bonds with one another and to feel as if they’re part of a cohesive unit is seldom wasted. The payoff comes in the level of cooperation among team members.

If some or all of your team members already know each other, then obviously the time you have to invest in orientation can be shorter than if a group of complete strangers is getting together for the first time. In either case though, it behooves you to review the fundamentals, such as who reports to whom, how resources are allocated, how we order supplies, and so on.

As the new team is assembled, don’t be afraid to call upon each member of the group during orientation and have him or her introduce themselves. If team members already know one another, have each team member speak about what he would like to accomplish or air any concerns he may have.

When it’s your time to speak, after saying a little about yourself, focus on the team ground rules, such as how time will be allocated and money will be spent. Also talk about the internal hierarchy within the team, in the case where some team members may be reporting to others, rather than to you.

Team members may have more questions that need to be addressed, such as the following:

If it helps, establish common terminology, so that team members know the difference between, say, putting a rush on something versus handling it as soon as possible. Craft your own exhibits, such as the example that follows, and share them group-wide so that everyone is singing from the same hymnal!

A Hierarchy of Requests

As you can begin to realize, by surfacing basic operational issues at the outset, you can alleviate burdens that you alone may have had to assume.

You’re not omniscient. You can’t think of everything. It is to your extreme benefit to have team members conversing, sharing ideas, and surfacing issues early in the game. In general, issues identified at early-round meetings help to head off problems that likely would have emerged later.

Everyone wants to feel as if he or she is a valuable addition to the team. And no one wants to be completely managed. People prefer to feel as if they are in a collaborative situation. They are more than willing to acknowledge you as the team leader, but they don’t want you to be autocratic in any way, shape, or form. Their highest level of contribution often directly relates to the degree to which they believe managerial-type information is shared freely with them. Especially in the case where you’ve assembled a number of get-it-done types on your team, you’re going to find that people don’t want to work in a vacuum.

For example, competent and responsible professional staff increasingly seek to gain access to the reports and management documents that you, as team leader, are privy to. If you’ve been a play-it-closely-to-the-chest type of manager until now, you may want to let go of the reins a little.

To increase the propensity that you’re all working in unison, with the same final objective in mind, each team member needs to have some access to the project management tools that you employ, such as Gantt or milestone charts, PERT charts, flowcharts, calendar tracking, and any other types of project management or scheduling software (see Chapter 13).

When team members have the opportunity to review Gantt or PERT charts and can observe how their current progress precisely impacts the progress of fellow team members, the probability increases that each team member will perform as required. After all, no one wants to look at a chart and discover that he or she is holding up the works!

As I stated in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Change Management, when all players have a vivid understanding of their roles and how they are interrelated, then group cohesiveness, uniformity, and peer pressure can generate significant input. As much as anything, remaining on the project’s schedule is fueled by each team member realizing the importance of his individual role, how responsibilities interconnect, and what it means to the team as a whole to stay on track. As team leader, once you’re assured that each of your team members possesses this level of realization, the potential for you to complete this project on time and within budget rises markedly. Peer pressure alone can often do the trick!

More often than not, you will be asked to assemble a team that consists largely of individuals who are able to participate only on a part-time basis. It’s not the best of all worlds, but depending on the talents and skills that team members bring to the project, it still may be more than enough to see you through to successful completion.

If you have to borrow staff from other departments and divisions within your organization, then your work is cut out for you. Getting quality people onboard in many instances means you have to dust off your negotiation skills. To recruit your staff, you may find yourself bargaining with the people in production, marketing, accounting, or finance. Even if successful, you may then have to negotiate with team members themselves as to how much energy and effort they’re realistically able to expend on your project.

Here’s another instance of where your skills of persuasion come into play. You’d probably prefer not to have to do this, but in some instances, you have to sell your project to others if it is going to get off the ground at all!

If there is predictable resistance from other managers to letting go of their good staff, why do they do it at all? They may be loyal and dedicated employees of the organization who recognize it’s for everyone’s good. Some managers realize that soon enough they’re going to be making the same types of requests of you. Some are forced to at least partially let go of staff people, and some simply see it as inevitable.

As a team leader, don’t be surprised if you find yourself in a continuing tug-of-war with other team leaders for talented staff people. This is the terrain of contemporary management and it’s not likely to change in the short run.

As mentioned, even when you get clearance from other managers to recruit talented staff for your team, you then have to sell your team on what it is you’re seeking to get done. Here, you draw upon every ounce of influence you can muster, all of your persuasion skills, everything you’ve learned about selling, whatever you know about packaging, positioning, merchandising, and successfully luring others.

You use your passion as a driving force (see Chapter 3). You paint a picture of what it would be like to realize the achievement. You convey a sense of excitement while remaining honest and above board.

You don’t want to over-sell and you don’t want to make promises you can’t keep. It’s one thing to successfully recruit people to be on your team, it’s quite another when they realize that you overstated, or worse, lied about how the project would unfold and what their experiences would be.

Once you’ve successfully recruited talented staff, you maintain your passion. Until they embrace the project as their own, team members will feed off of your energy. You’ll know if you’ve assembled a winning staff: when their energies feed off of one another, much like a baseball team proceeding toward the pennant in late September.

Just as you were truthful in recruiting skilled and talented employees to be part of your team, it pays to be truthful as you proceed along the path to getting something done.

When you leave out critical facts, or paint a rosy picture on how the team is progressing, you can actually impede performance because you’re preventing your staff members from seeing reality. In other words, how can each of your team members succeed at their assigned roles if they don’t know the true situation they face? So, as your project ensues, telling the truth becomes more vital than merely relating good news.

One of the most frustrating experiences for team leaders is when they assemble the right people, establish the right action plan, and still find that progress isn’t anywhere near what they envisioned. You’ve got to stay loose, and be willing to turn on a dime.

Flexible team leaders finish first. Inflexible team leaders are still trying to figure out what went wrong. Adopt the mindset that setbacks and mistakes that you make along the way are inevitable, and they also represent opportunities for learning, redirection, and growth.

Create an environment that says, “We strive to do our best, but sometimes mistakes will happen.” When team members know that you won’t blow your top and can handle some of the inevitable bumps in the road, they’re more willing to: (1) take appropriate risks, (2) accept responsibility for any mistakes that they do make, (3) learn from them, and (4) move on.

The more challenging the project, and the tighter the time frame and more restrictive the budget, the more likely mistakes will occur. Seek to have everyone acknowledge them for what they are, and ascertain if there are any opportunities as a result of a mistake.

The knowledge and even wisdom that team members gain as a result of their mistakes, shared with the whole group, can sometimes benefit the entire project in ways that you might not have imagined.

People at all levels of experience prefer to be held accountable for the work they do. They also want to receive regular feedback as to how they’re doing. When you give them appropriate feedback, they know what they’re doing right, they know what they’re doing wrong, and they can learn and improve. If you go too long without giving people feedback, they begin to wonder if you’re noticing at all, or if you even care.

Some team leaders make the mistake of not giving feedback, especially to highly competent staff, figuring they already know they’re doing a good job, so why bother with excess verbiage? Like partners in a loving relationship, people want to know on a continuing basis that their partners still want them above all else. So too, your team members want to hear from you, even if you only offer performance feedback as little as once a day.

Even if you have the knowledge and skills of Peter Drucker, Ph.D., the premiere management guru of the twentieth century, conflict between you and team members, or between team members themselves, often is unavoidable. Too many team leaders regard conflict as something that is to be avoided at all costs, but is that a sound approach to team leadership? Not necessarily.

When conflict is left untouched, it can fester, grow at an alarming rate, and ultimately upend a team’s progress in ways you’d prefer not to experience.

It’s best to identify conflict as it emerges and, generally, you’ll encounter two basic types of conflict. With the first type, a single team member has problems relating to someone else on the team, or the entire team itself. Such conflict can result in jealousy, hostility, mistrust, disharmony, or withdrawal.

The other type of conflict you’re likely to encounter has to do with a particular task or assignment, the appropriateness of a particular procedure, or how the group itself is managing its resources. Since this type of conflict is not based on the personalities of team members, conflict may have resulted regardless of who is on the team.

Fortunately, with both types of conflicts, there are antidotes. By allowing underlying issues to emerge, a team can sweep away some of the barriers early in a project, while they’re still relatively easy to deal with, and hence help to establish an environment that leads to project success.

In the case of conflict between individual team members, by surfacing the issues and having both parties air their grievances, the entire team can benefit. Sometimes you’re able to identify and dislodge other issues that would have come up even later.

Now, in a climate of exploration and of mutual understanding, you can deal with the conflict. This opportunity wouldn’t have emerged in a climate of passivity or ignorance.

In addressing the second type of conflict, recognize that it can be constructive, energizing, and even motivating. In some instances, this type of conflict actually acts to fuel progress rather than thwart it. You can help members to recognize that they share some deep-rooted values and common aspirations.

The synergy that you derive from holding such sessions often more than pays for itself in terms of team members’ increased energy and renewed commitment to the project.