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Carolyn O'Hara
September 11, 2014
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 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
Whether you re 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 cofounder 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 organizational behavior at Simmons College and is the
author of the HBR Guide to Leading Teams. 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 behavior 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. 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 explain in detail how you want the team to work. 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. Make clear what the team is working
toward and how you expect it to get there. 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
Case study #1: When in doubt, over-communicate
Czarina Walker, the founder and CEO of InfiniEDGE Software, had a crisis on her
hands. She had recently taken over the leadership of a combined team of
engineers and creative employees for a new project. With a deep well of
experience leading technical teams, she assumed that the minimalist management
approach that had worked for her for years would also work with this hybrid
team. I figured the non-techies had some understanding of our technical team s
processes, and knew how we worked by virtue of shared office osmosis, Czarina
says.
But the team dynamics floundered from the beginning. My technical team didn t
have a problem getting in a room and talking about what was going well and what
wasn t, says Czarina. But this standard tactic of identifying improvement
areas with her engineers felt like a blame game to the new creative members.
They felt thrown into this process; it was like being invited to a firing
squad. Resentments festered, and soon she was having difficulty getting
everyone to attend the weekly status meetings. As a result, the project
started off the exact way you hope it never does with a lot of frustration
and animosity, she says.
Czarina recognized that her failure to establish communication norms was partly
to blame. She hadn t made the purpose of the status meetings clear, and hadn t
explained that her agenda was not aimed at criticizing, but at getting everyone
on the same page. So I had to do something I never had to do before:
over-communicate, Czarina says. She sat down with both groups to go over the
purpose of the meetings, and how she expected them to be run, while addressing
each groups concerns.
The extra work paid off. The project was completed on deadline, and the
creative team members reported that they felt the process had been a valuable
learning experience. Even though I had to over-communicate, Czarina says, it
was well worth it, because the next project is going to go so much smoother.
Case study #2: Build connections outside the office
For the past decade, Nate Riggs, the founder of marketing firm NR Media Group,
has run a virtual office, with employees scattered across the country. But this
year, after realizing the company needed a brick-and-mortar base to grow its
video production unit, Nate transitioned the firm to the new Columbus, Ohio,
headquarters.
Because some employees still worked remotely and others reported to the office
each day, Nate recognized that challenges and miscommunications could arise
among the group, some of whom were new employees. So he held a team retreat in
Columbus, a combination of strategy sessions, client meet-and-greets, and
after-hours social events. The team cohesiveness that was developed on that
retreat has been amazing, says Nate.
The team-building efforts had immediate benefits. We left with a lot of
momentum. Our first week back, we were meeting deliverables in about half the
time that it took us before the retreat, says Nate.
In order to maintain the energy, the team now gathers each week in a virtual
Google Hangout with a set agenda. Nate also has regular one-on-one meetings
with each team member to get status updates and reassess goals. We try to keep
high-frequency touches with the team, but not so much that it interferes with
getting work done, he says.
He has also encouraged the team to maintain the social connections they
established at the retreat. To mimic the banter that might have happened around
the office water cooler, employees have recently launched a group texting
thread, regularly sharing jokes, interesting news, and funny stories with
coworkers. To me, that s the indicator of a team culture, right? says Nate.
We all have something that we can laugh at together.
Carolyn O Hara is a writer and editor based in New York City. She s worked at
The Week, PBS NewsHour, and Foreign Policy. Follow her on Twitter at
@carolynohara1.