Nowadays! Everyone wants to succeed in their businesses, want to deliver their best quality products, and excellent services, for delighting their clients. For that, a company’s teams are their backbone for it. Businesses need strong teams that work smartly, with excellence. Without the talented team, you’re just the walking dead without motor skills to go where you want to go.
The crucial role of a team was highlighted by a recent study from Rotman School of Management. It exhibits that the success of a new venture often depends on the expertise of the founder to attract a great team around him or her. The researchers used census data to analyze employers in the legal services sector to try and spot any patterns which were spinning out new ventures. The sector was chosen because there are no non-compete rules to prevent employees packing their bags and starting their own venture.
“A founder’s individual characteristics are important but what’s more important are that person’s ability to bring a bigger and more experienced team with them,” the researchers say. “And the bigger that team the more likely the firm will succeed.”
What is a Team?
A team is any group of people who work together to achieve something to gain a shared outcome. It may be a sales team, or a call center team, or a rugby team, or the executive team of a multinational corporation. The same simple rules for success apply to all of them.
It starts with the team leader. Every team needs a leader, a captain, a chief, and the success of that team is almost entirely dependent on what the team leader does – and doesn’t do. Great team ensures great teamwork, achieved by consistent application of some age-old basics:
Clear Accountabilities: Does everyone know exactly what they are accountable for? Even with detailed job descriptions, people often don’t know what they are supposed to do. The team leader needs to make the team is crystal about its RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consult, and Inform- a simple, powerful tool you can easily google).
Simple Measures: Are there the few clear steps towards each, and for the team as a whole? People love to know when they are doing a good job. They want to know what they must deliver and whether they are getting it right.
Robust Disciplines: Good teams have solid routines that create a regular cadence-daily, weekly or monthly usually in the form of group meetings. Plan-Do-Review – the drumbeat of performance.
Coaching for performance and growth: Team members thrive on good, objecting feedback. They will be more committed if they feel their performance is fairly assessed if their real work is acknowledged and justly rewarded. A sense that one is being encouraged to grow and advance is profoundly motivating.
Skills: Team members need technical skills to get the job done- accounting skills or merchandising skills or front desk customers service skills. And also management skills- in particular for the team leaders- to keep the team engaged, focused and productive from Monday to Friday.
Maintaining a quality reputation amongst your target audience is imperative to being successful in business. What your customers think of you will ultimately shape, whether or not they’re willing to do business with you. Reputation management is also an ongoing practice that requires an array of techniques. However, at the top of the list is quality customer service. The quality of services you provide to your customers will ultimately shape their opinion of you. Since your staff is involved in providing day to day services, it will be important to have a competent team that is aware of how to handle the customer’s needs accordingly.
The bottom line is that the right people do all the things that are necessary to get the business to grow: they get the product right; they get the service right; the culture is healthy; they get a motivated team behind them. Everything else falls in line. If you don’t have this right, the opposite happens. It’s a painful and expensive mess.