Team Building: The Basic Dynamics of a Great Team (Part One)

Building effective teams is a corporate mantra that many preach but few actually ever achieve.

Team building is both a science and an art. It’s a science because you have to get the right people, in the right place, at the right time. It’s an art because you have to get the right ‘type’ of people in the right place, doing the right thing, at the right time.

Confused?

Let me explain.

Tenant One: Get the Right People for the Right Job

The first tenant of building a fine team is get people who know what they are doing (Basic common sense you say? Well hasn’t come one told you that common sense isn’t all that common?).

Be it a technical team or a service oriented team or a special task force, never, as far as possible, compromise on the quality of the team members whether selecting entry level people or people at the leadership/supervisory level - This is where a comprehensive job description for each job becomes so important.

Tenant Two: Know the Thinkers and the Doers

I believe that every team, no matter its purpose or the situation, can broadly be said to comprise of two types of people: The Thinkers and The Doers.

The Thinkers are those who are good at, well, thinking! These people are good at putting their imagination, knowledge, experience, unique point of views etc to use to come up with sound, workable or in other words practical ideas or solutions either verbally or on paper. Though they may be great at generating workable ideas, they may not be very good at actually executing these ideas themselves. That’s where the Doers come in.

The Doers as you must have realised by now are those people in the team who are great at executing ideas or possibilities. These team members usually are great at working at the or from the ground level and actually converting a possibility on paper to reality. Many a times these members are the ‘quietly confident’ types. They may not be as verbose as ‘The Thinkers’, but that doesn’t mean that they are any less confident and competent.

But ofcourse I am sure that many of you must have come across those who are pretty good at coming up with ideas and actually executing them too. These are the ‘All Rounders’. But these are few and far between. (One good example would be the special operations or commando teams like the Navy Seals, Green Berets, Black Cats etc. who have to constantly plan and re-plan on the go when in a battle situation and put those plans into action in a matter of minutes sometimes.)

It’s important for a manager, when he/she’s putting a team together, to know who are the Thinkers, the Doers and the All Rounders so that a team is balanced as far as possible, and both the ideas and the actions of the team are of the highest quality possible with the minimum possible turn around time.

Tenant Three: Take Time to Know the Team

A lot of managers or team leaders simply leave the ‘knowing your team’ part to the ‘Ill -get-to-know-them-as -we –go -along’ syndrome. That’s the biggest mistake you can make as a team lead, especially if it’s a team that’s going to be together for a long term project or is a permanent one. That’s because sometimes small misunderstandings between the team members can develop into almost unmanageable problems later on and more often than not result out of or lead to groupism – which is a lot like smoking, kills slowly, but kills for sure.

Another big issue could be the build of resentment against you – the team lead and other senior members of the team over a period of time, or worse still, right at the beginning. This could happen because either all or most of the team members might not be very clear of the purpose of the team; it’s method of functioning, or their individual responsibilities.

It’s thus paramount to have a ‘huddle’ or sit the team down before the commencement of any serious activity and to have a ‘semi-formal’ debriefing session that clarifies all of the above and also imparts to the team a sense of definite purpose, importance and togetherness.

To be Continued......