5 Strategies for Team Development

All managers struggle with team development. But if you want to take your team to the next level, you too have to be ready to grow as a person and as a professional. Team Development Strategies are a must in order that dynamic teams grow.

You have to inspire and motivate your employees to chart their own paths in the corporate ladder. You should focus on the development of your team with the goal of leveraging their success and strengths to achieve your overall goals and objectives. Start conducting some team building activities to build an effective team.

5 Tried and Tested Team Development Strategies

With that in mind, here are five team development strategies you can apply to increase efficiency, teamwork and collaboration in your company.

#1. Dismantle the hierarchy

If you want to establish a strongly collaborative relationship with your employees, it is crucial that you actively attempt to be perceived as a leader rather than a boss. An authoritative hierarchy creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and angst. It heavily compromises worker motivation, satisfaction, and ultimately output productivity.

Therefore for a steady organizational development, you must show your workers that they are no subordinates. You should tell them that you have confidently hired them due to their commendable values, vision, ambitions and skills.

Introduce a power dynamic that establishes you as an empathetic human first. You should be someone who is willing to drop the formalities for a more respectable, enjoyable, and fundamentally liberal working environment. This is how you build your workers’ trust in you as a genuine leader. You should let your team feel that they are actual assets to your business.

This is very crucial for team building and most definitely sustainable growth.

#2. Nurture leaders, not workers

Leaders are motivated, focused, and committed to every project they handle. They do not just report to work because they need a paycheck at the end month. They report to work with common goals in their mind; wanting to make a difference in their team projects, departments, organization, industry, and the world as a whole.

They are not “the boss” per se, but they know how to take charge of every project they are in. You do not need to push them around to get results. Leaders are facilitators too. They help other colleagues manage their time and company resources effectively. They are always ready to share their technical expertise for the benefit of other team members.

Such employees understand that as much as they could have a better scope or comprehension of a task at hand, their style might not always be the only way. That helps them accommodate varied opinions even when they have their reservations. Leaders will wait for your direction and approval, but they are never afraid to step in when called into action.

Leaders are not hired. They are nurtured. Focus on nurturing young recruits so that they can become high performing leaders in their own small capacity.

#3. Encourage frequent communication

Frequent communication is a necessity in any team. It is the tool that helps team members share ideas, overcome obstacles, pass instructions among themselves, and resolve conflicts. In addition to this, it eliminates duplicity in a team and enhances collaboration.

Ensure that employees have regular in-person meetings and brainstorming sessions. Invest in email and other virtual communication tools to enable virtual teams to collaborate effectively. Train them to use zip files when sharing big files via email, storing files in the cloud, and to sync documents across remotely-located devices for easier team collaboration.

#4. Help members understand their role

Most of your team members have general ideas of what their roles entail. But general is never enough. You need to give each member an in-depth understanding of the company vision, team goals, and the role they play in actualizing the vision.

Ensure that every new recruit understands how their role fits into the success of the team and company. Help each employee align their career goals with the team’s overall goals. When everyone knows what they are expected to do, you prevent duplicity of roles and create a cohesive team in which everyone respects each other’s contributions.

#5. Develop strong conflict resolution mechanisms

It is wishful thinking to assume that all workers will work in harmony despite their diverse cultural and professional backgrounds, different ambitions, generational gaps, contrasting personalities, as well as religious and sexuality preferences.

There will always be a couple of employees who cannot seem to like each other and work together. No matter how hard you try to build a cohesive team or conduct team building exercises, they do not get along well. That is why you need to liaise with the human resources department in resolving personal issues as they arise.

Create an avenue through which employees can air out their grievances and sort out their differences without fear of victimization.

Conclusion

Teamwork is a prerequisite to greater creativity, productivity, and effectiveness. It is a platform where individual talents collaborate to produce exceptionally high quality final products. And because you need to take the best final product to the market in order to get the much-needed competitive advantage, you have to do everything in your power to ensure that your team members are all on the same page no matter what.