Six Steps to a Winning Team in Your Business

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Six steps to a winning team in your business

Business success relies heavily on the performance of your team and an effective team doesn’t just happen by itself.

It can take time, effort and the right approach to ensure your workforce, no matter how big or small, is made up of people who are all pulling in the same direction towards the same goals.

So how do you create that winning team?

Obviously the first step is hiring the right people, and we’ve discussed that in a previous blog. So, assuming you have your team members in place, what’s next – where do you go from there?

We all know that ‘teamwork makes the dreamwork’ and that ‘Together Everyone Achieves More’, there’s no I in team and all that, but that’s not really telling you how to arrive at that wonderful team-playing destination.

The ActionCoach approach focuses on six practical and easy steps you can follow to help you create that all-important winning team.

Strong Leadership

It sounds obvious, but every successful team starts with a good leader. Strong leaders set the agenda, direction and attitude for the whole team. This means creating an environment of trust, respect, good communication and shared values. You want your team members to know they are valued, listened to and that they can trust you to make the right decisions. It means being charismatic, engaging and encouraging people to buy into your vision and to support you on your business’s journey.

Common Goals

A successful team has to know where it’s going and what it’s working towards. If everyone’s going off in different directions with no real steer, you’ll soon find that nothing much is really being achieved.

Setting clear overall goals, with smaller targets within that to help achieve the main goals, will help the team stay on track. It can be useful to set long term, medium term and short-term goals. By making sure everyone in your team is aware of these goals, you can ensure that all activities have a direction and purpose. It’s worth regularly reviewing to ensure they are still relevant and that you’re still focusing on them.

Rules of the Game

The rules of the game are important for defining how the team, and the individuals within it, should operate. It means identifying what the expectations are for behaviours, actions and responsibilities, establishing and communicating core values and defining structures.

Action Plan

Once you have your goals and your rules of play, the next thing a winning team needs is an action plan. It’s all well and good having goals but unless you determine a clear plan of action, the goals will just sit in the ether, neither here nor there and never really coming to fruition. An action plan ensures ideas become reality and by identifying and documenting who will do what and by when.

Break your goals down into logical steps and assign each person with a task or tasks and a deadline. Use regular team meetings to review progress against the action plan and end with a list of new actions, who will be accountable for them and when they must be completed by. This is important for ensuring everyone knows exactly what is expected of them and enables you to measure performance.

Support risk taking

Winning teams feel able, inspired and encouraged to innovate, create and develop. As long as they are working towards defined shared goals and within the rules of the game, the best teams will be able to take risks along the way. You want your employees to feel empowered to aim high, come up with ideas and try new things. This helps to create happy employees and you just never know what they might achieve.

100% involvement/inclusion

The best teams work when all the constituent parts feel included and accepted. This means working together on goals, sharing opinions, sharing successes and failures and involving everyone where you can. You should lead by example on this and in return you should expect 100% commitment to the task from every team member. You need to be prepared to make tough decisions if you’re faced with any employees who are not willing to contribute fully for the good of the team.

Hopefully if you implement these six steps, you will be well on your way to a winning team. It can also help to gain a deeper understanding of yourself as a leader and the personality traits of the individuals in your team and how to get the best out of them. DISC profiling can be a really useful tool in this respect.

Team not working as it should? Contact your ActionCoach if you need any additional help or advice to get this back on track.