As a business owner, or manager, you take pride in crafting your team and structuring your company so that everyone is happily working together to push the business forward, but even the best teams get into a funk sometimes. Performance can drop, employee moods can sour and your utopia of a business environment is suddenly a dreadful place to be. Don’t worry, though, because it’s – usually – an easy fix.
The Four Cornerstones
There are four factors that make a team successful, and if your team is struggling, you can usually find the reason in one of these areas. They are:
Goals – There should be a common goal that the team is working together to achieve. If you have a goal for your team you need to make sure that everyone is buying into that goal and that their responsibilities correlate with achieving that goal.
Roles – Every team should have defined roles that each have their own clear expectations. If team members are not clear with their role and how it fits into the hierarchy of the company’s authority structure, then they’ll have trouble performing. You must also be sure that everyone has the correct skill-set to succeed in the roles they’ve been assigned.
Processes – Do you have easy-to-understand processes in place so that you team knows how to make important decisions, collaborate across departments, and review progress on a regular basis? Even with a clear team goal and well defined roles, your team can get bogged down if there aren’t well crafted business processes in place.
Relationships – If your team members don’t have complete trust in one another, it will lead to problems in a hurry. Everyone should know and understand each other’s roles and why they’re important to the team’s success. They don’t have to all be best friends, but trusting each other is key to great team performance.
Don’t Solve For Red Flags
With the constant demands of running a business, it becomes easy to solve for the red flags that show up in your team, but if you don’t find and address the deeper issue, it can become a major problem quickly. If your team’s performance has dropped recently, you should reassess each of these four key areas and determine where the issue lies.
By understanding the four cornerstones of a successful team, you can avoid making knee-jerk reactions to a drop in team performance, and keep your team running smoothly.