What Team Leaders Should Know About Building a Team

Every company aims to build a high performing team that will help them tackle difficult tasks and complicated projects. Setting up a team requires bringing together people with different skills, ideologies, attitudes and beliefs. Making things work between these people proves to be a difficult task for team leaders and managers.

Handling a team requires patience and expertise when it comes to dealing with people. Here are things that you need to do when starting up a team within your company:

• Discover individual strengths. You need to play to your team’s individual strengths. Knowing your people entails the task of discovering their strengths and weaknesses. Learn what area of work they’re good at and you’ll have your starting point. An individual’s deficiency can make or break a project. We often have members with irreversible weaknesses but we are unable to let them go because we badly need their strengths. If this happens what you can do is to pair them up with another member that can complement his strengths.
• Practice transparency and clearness. Make sure that you encourage your team to be work out their differences. Your team is like a family at work. Differences in strategies and ideas are just some of the things that might create division within the team. As a manager, what you need to do is to make them work out their concerns. This might seem awkward at the beginning but they’ll get along well and improve their working relationship. They might not even need you for mediation the next time they have a row.
• Support them. Your primary task as a team leader is to make sure that you support your team. Allowing them to feel that you are backing them up with all their ideas and projects will boost their self-confidence. Guiding them and foster their professional growth.
• Team goals and ground rules. Orient your team members on how you like things are done and what are the established goals that you want to achieve. Letting them know this make them see the finish line ahead. Your preferred way of getting things done may serve as a structure while they are working for your team. Some things might not work your way but still it will be best if your team has a working framework from their leader.
• Offer incentives. Aside from the great feeling about finishing a project, an incentive or any added bonus is like the icing on a cake. Monetary incentives, a group trip for team building Australia or a full course dinner are great choices as rewards for your team. Every employee enjoys a time away from work. Compensate your team with incentives not just because they finished a project successfully but because they worked hard for a task and they deserve it.

Take time to study your team and you’ll discover what are the things that you need to do for them to know their full potential and what they can do for the company. Hone them to be the next leaders because their success is yours as well.