Reloaded Teams: How to have a recharged team.

By Daniel A. AlarconETAM Alarcon Consultores. 2014

El Salvador

Justification

Working Teams experiment the normal cycle of every team: consolidate, mature, member or leader changes, new business requirements, changes in environment, change on Enterprise Strategies. These are reasons that obligate teams to reload.

We have read about self managed teams, star teams, high efficient teams and so on so far, but at the end what we need is that our teams work aligned with the strategy and in a consistent way provide results (positive and according goals)

How to reload a Team?

Reload the Leaders

Since Team results and Team performance is a reflection of his or her leader. The very first person that must be reloaded is the Leader. Your leaders must be trained, aligned with Vision and strategies and committed on company’s results.

If the Leader is motivated the transmission to the team will be easy.

Excellent leader= Excellent team

Evaluate the team

An individual evaluation must be performed.

You need to know the skills, competences and qualifications of each member of your team.

In this step, some decisions should be made, because you need the right members and a team according the established goals.

A good leader knows almost perfectly each of his team members.

Have the Vision, Mision and Strategy

You must have and know the Vision and Mision of the company. In addition you need to know the Strategies company is following.

Then, you have to transmit and let your team interiorize these in order to align all of your members.

The Vision gives your team the main direction.

Train in Execution

Is well known that the biggest difficult Is how to execute our strategies.Have your leaders and team members trained in Strategy Execution. They must know good techniques to have strategies implemented and monitored. A team without execution is a normal team, but if you have a team executing and measuring, you will get a high performance and well driven team.

At the end, Execution is what counts for results.

Define Team’s goals

Executive Team or the General Manager must define in conjunction with you the goals for your team. Preferable, these goals should be part of a consensus and discussed with the team.They must feel these goals are “Theirs”

If goals and objectives were already set, there is a change to reevaluate due to changes you are seeing in the environment and business.

If a team has clear goals, they have a clear direction to move to.

Train

Your team must be in a periodic training update. The idea is that the Leader and all members are trained to have all the necessary skills and competences for the work they are required to perform.

Training must be seen as an investment for the company. Training must be under a plan coming from HR department and developed according company’s strategy, team goals, and members needs.

According each area you can use techniques as simulations, case method, technical discussions, vendors speechs.

Trained members = trained team = better results

Measure

How are you going to evaluate a performance without measuring?Team must have a visible Score board , where all members can see current progress of each indicator .

Post measures are good, but the most important are those that can be followed and controlled before the end of a period.

As 4DX theory, we must act on the Lead to have better Lag measures. Important to have early influence in those activites that leverage our KPIs.

If we do not measure we can not realize our performance

Have a name and Slogan

If your team receive a Team Building training, you must remember that one of the activities was to have your team with a name and slogan.

Why leaving this important activity only for a training session?

Why not promoting to have a name and slogan for your team afterwards?

Having a name and slogan could impact positively and give additional engagement to the team members.

Use Improvement Opportunities

Instead of pointing out on weaknesses, use Improvement Opportunities to indicate those areas in which a team or some members need to improve.

You must identify those members with some weakness and become his or her coach. Remember that each member is contributing to team results and all of them are important.

When he or she hear about Improvement opportunities they feel that the Leader is taking care of them.

Follow up

Main promoter of follow up actions must be the Leader. Establish short meetings and in a weekly, biweekly or monthly base, depending on the team work or need.

Must have a short agenda, preferable in a range of 15-20 minutes. Focused on the agenda and focused on the KPIs follow up.

Every meeting must end up with a plan to make corrections or changes.

Effective meeting = Better results

Learn to Celebrate

Teach your teams to Celebrate, motivate them to do so and provide the necessary resources for the celebrations.

Work must have a part of fun and motivate them to celebrate milestones as well as main goals.

When a team celebrates, integration increases. Motivation and engagement increase too.

Motivate to Celebrate

Conclusion

There are a lot of changes in Business Environment and Customers are now more demanding.

To have high performance, integrated, aligned, trained and committed teams is not simple or easy. Requires Top Management participation, demand resources and a good plan. But is a business demand.

Extraordinary Results are seen in Extraordinary Companies, where Extraordinary Leaders have conformed Extraordinary Teams.

At ETAM Alarcon Consultores we have developed indoor and outdoor Team Building trainings.

You can make any consult or send questions to>

Mr. Daniel AlarconDirector.dalarcon07@yahoo.com El Salvador, Central America 2014 ™