Not only does your level of effectiveness and efficiency set the right example, but it instils a healthy level of fear in your team that they absolutely must keep up with you.

This means your area must be well organized and you need to learn how to confidently organize your entire workload to the point that it seems you could handle more projects (even though part of being organized is to never take on as much as you can, but rather to have few projects that you execute rapidly).

Learn how to get organized in my 7 Steps of Organizing program.

Differences in ideas, skills, motivations, even beliefs can constrain a team’s performance. A lack of resources and tools such as communication systems can slow a team down. Insufficient planning from a lack of open discussion can lead to conflicts and misunderstandings.

In fact, through primary research as well as my own experience over a decade of work in companies both large and small, I discovered a number of fundamental causes of poor teamwork.

They can be grouped under 4 categories. This is the Teamwork Training Molecule…

1. Problems caused by upper management
2. Problems caused by team managers
3. Problems caused in team cohesion
4. Problems with individual team members

“The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.” – Babe Ruth

Problems, problems, problems. Upper management wants to have it’s say, and often causes disruption for teamwork. Team managers themselves often lack the experience of successfully guiding team collaboration and performance. Thus teams do not have the cohesion of a purposefully aligned team, and there may even be specific problems with individual members of the team such as resistance to change, incompentence, or just plain old chronic laziness.

I don’t claim to know all of them… I think management skills include business skills, project management skills, communication skills, leadership skills, and much much more.

Team building means strengthening an interdependent group of people for long-term effectiveness

Ken Blanchard uses the acronym PERFORM to explain the necessary characteristics of high performing teams.

Your role in management is to develop the skills necessary to facilitate PERFORM.

• Purpose and Values
• Empowerment
• Relationships and communication
• Flexibility
• Optimal Performance
• Recognition and Appreciation
• Morale

Any effective manager must pursue growth in these areas.

1. Your Team Must Be Clear

Peter F. Drucker, one of the worlds most revered management thinkers with Harvard Business Review saying ‘his writings are landmarks of the managerial profession’, says

“Effective Executives do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.”

Therefore, ask each member of your team to record their activities and time spent on those activities for 3 consecutive days. Then once that?s done, help them define each of their responsibilities, roles and opportunities for growth, in relation to your teams purpose and overall objectives.

This will help get control over what they are currently spending time on… and what they ought to be spending time on.

2. Your Team Must Be Organized

If you ask your team members to show you how they organize their projects, they will be encouraged to get better organized than they already are.

It is the accountability they have to be better organized coming from you as manager that can have a great effect on how well organized they become.

3. Your Team Must Be Motivated

Fortunately, this one is easy to achieve once your team is clear, and organized. The best way to motivate your team is to make them accountable to achieving what they are clear on, and organized for.

No not dreaded staff meetings. A simple lightening-fast review meeting with each individual of your team. Let them show you “how its coming?” for each project they are accountable for.

When you make regular reviews (what is the next step?) for your teams projects, you help them to remain accountable and on-top of their projects.

Tell people upfront that you are going to let them know how they are doing.

Get the 2010 research in a complimentary copy of the white paper available from this page.

The new research is presented in detailed visual diagrams which expose the connections between poor team performance and the 4-part team molecule.

Titled: ”The 4 Hurdles of Team Performance” the paper reveals:

• Why problems with team performance exist
• What to change to
• And how to cause the change

About

The white paper’s lead author, Gavriel Shaw, is an ex senior marketing manager having worked in various team environments both good and bad across various industries and is now touring South America whilst growing his professional network and writing about business, life and the world.

Companies that have contributed to the paper are represented by their logos on this page.

A team brings greater leverage, but on the flip side, problems in a team can have a compounding effect on poor performance for each individual team member. And managing a team comes with a web of factors to untangle and control. So just…

What are the constraints of teamwork?

Differences in ideas, skills, motivations, even beliefs can constrain a team’s performance. A lack of resources and tools such as communication systems can slow a team down. Insufficient planning from a lack of open discussion can lead to conflicts and misunderstandings.

In fact, through primary research as well as my own experience over a decade of work in companies both large and small, I discovered a number of fundamental causes of poor teamwork.

They can be grouped under 4 categories. This is the Teamwork Training Molecule…

1. Problems caused by upper management
2. Problems caused by team managers
3. Problems caused in team cohesion
4. Problems with individual team members

“The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.” – Babe Ruth

Problems, problems, problems. Upper management wants to have it’s say, and often causes disruption for teamwork. Team managers themselves often lack the experience of successfully guiding team collaboration and performance. Thus teams do not have the cohesion of a purposefully aligned team, and there may even be specific problems with individual members of the team such as resistance to change, incompentence, or just plain old chronic laziness.

What kind of teamwork training is best partly depends on the situation and the team, but it’s easy enough to appreciate that the solution to teamwork training can be described with 3 components: Outcome, Constraints and Processes.

1. Outcome means the identification of what you want to achieve via the team. Both the team’s grand purpose or objective, as well as it’s collaborative projects which lead towards that overall desired outcome.
2. Constraints management means knowing where you are and what’s in the way of getting to where you want.
3. Productivity is the ways and means (the ‘how to’) for achieving the identified outcome through projects and process by eliminating the constraints.

That might seem somewhat circular, and it is. That’s why it is an undeniably clear and precise protocol on which to base teamwork training for success. It’s easy to see how clarity of outcomes, managing constraints, and managing the throughput of activities will facilitate greater cohesion within the team.

Some inexpensive training guides can be picked up at Accel on team development.