Getting people to work together isn’t easy, and unfortunately many leaders skip over the basics of team building in a rush to start achieving goals. But your actions in the first few weeks and months can have a major impact on whether your team ultimately delivers results.
What the to do???
What steps should you take to set your team up for success?
How do you form group norms, establish clear goals, and create an environment where everyone feels comfortable and motivated to contribute?
What the Experts Say
Either as taking over an existing team or starting a new one, it’s critical to devote time and energy to establishing how you want your team to work, not just what you want them to achieve.
The first few weeks are critical. “People form opinions pretty quickly, and these opinions tend to be sticky,” says Michael Watkins, the co-founder of Genesis Advisers and author of the updated The First 90 Days. “If you don’t take time upfront to figure out how to get the team working well, problems are always going to come up,” says Mary Shapiro, who teaches organisational behaviour at Simmons College. “You either pay upfront or you pay later.” Here’s how to start your team off on the right foot.
Get to know each other
“One of your first priorities should be to get to know your team members and to encourage them to get to better know one another,” says Shapiro. To that end, “resist the urge to immediately start talking about the work and the task outcome,” and focus instead on fostering camaraderie. In practice, this may mean holding a retreat or beginning meetings with team-building exercises.
For virtual teams, it might mean starting calls by getting updates on how each person is doing or hosting virtual happy hours or coffee breaks. One particularly effective exercise is to have people share their best and worst team experiences, says Shapiro. Discussing those good and bad dynamics will help everyone get on the same page about what behaviour they want to encourage — and avoid — going forward.
Show what you stand for
Use your initial interactions with team members as an opportunity to showcase your values and how these align to the businesses values. Explain what’s behind each of your decisions, what your priorities are, and how you will evaluate the team’s performance, individually and collectively.
Walk them through what metrics you might use to gauge progress, so that they understand how they’ll be evaluated and what’s expected of them. “Team members will want to know how you define success,” says Shapiro. By communicating your vision and values, you will show your team that you’re committed to a healthy degree of transparency, says Watkins, and “create positive momentum around yourself in the new role.”
Explain how you want the team to work
You also need to highlight how you want the team to work.
What the expectations are of behaviour, how the mechanics of the team will achieve your desired outcomes.
When you have newer team members coming on board, don’t assume that veteran team members will explain to the new recruits how meetings are supposed to be run or the best ways to ask for help; it’s your job as a leader to set expectations and explain processes.
If you don’t make those norms clear for everyone, you risk creating an environment where people feel excluded, uncertain, or unwilling to contribute.
Set or clarify goals
One of your most important tasks as a team leader is to set ambitious but achievable goals with your team’s input.
Bring the team in on strategies such as SMART Actions (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Time bound Actions as a culture set within your team.
By setting these goals early on, the group’s decision making will be clearer and more efficient, and you’ll lay the framework of holding team members accountable. Many managers inherit their teams, which often means they aren’t creating new goals, but clarifying existing ones. “It’s actually rare that someone gets to come in and redefine the goals for the group in a profound way,” says Watkins. In those instances, your challenge as a manager is to reorganize roles or rethink strategies to best achieve the goals at hand.
Keep your door open
If there’s one thing that new managers need to remember, it’s that over-communicating in the early days is preferable to the alternative. “It’s always better to start with more structure, more touch points, more check-ins at the beginning,” says Shapiro. How you do that — via big meetings, one-on-ones, email, or shared progress reports — will vary from team to team and manager to manager, but whatever the communication method, “do as much as you can,” says Shapiro. Watkins agrees: “I’ve never encountered a situation where a team member says, ‘Gosh, I wish the boss would stop communicating with me. I’m so sick of hearing from her.’ You just never hear that.”
Score an “early win”
Identifying and solving a business problem that has a quick and dramatic impact early on shows that you can listen and get things done, says Watkins. Perhaps there is a longstanding employee frustration or an outdated work process. Maybe there is a project that you can easily fund or prioritize. Taking swift action demonstrates that “you are connecting and learning.” But most importantly, achieving an “early win” builds team momentum. “It motivates people,” says Shapiro, “and can win you goodwill you might need later if the going gets tough.”
Principles to Remember
Do:
- Be clear about what goes into your decision making and how you’ll evaluate the team’s progress
- Encourage team members to connect — better communication early on will help avoid misunderstandings and poor results later
- Look for roadblocks or grievances you can fix — it will earn you capital and inspire the team
Don’t:
- Jump into trying to accomplish the work without building relationships with the team
- Assume that new team members understand how you or others work — take the time to explain processes and expectations.
- Be afraid to communicate often early on — you can always pull back when the team is working well