Effective Team Building Strategies – Getting It Right From The Outset

Looking for effective team building strategies?

There comes the point in your business when working alone is no longer an option, and you need to bring in helping hands on a more permanent basis if you want to pursue your ambitions. Therefore, you need to learn effective team building strategies.

This could be a make or break situation, so it’s wise to consider what the best team composition would be from the outset. The link between team composition and it’s efficiency has been well established for more than 50 years in scientific literature, but where do you start if you’ve never had to source your own team and what are effective team building strategies?

Here are effective team building strategies:

If you’ve had a team before, it is likely that you inherited a team that were already in place so being in a position where you can really think about the type of team you would like to build to support your business is a great opportunity.

 When it comes to effective team building strategies there are some questions that we first must consider:

• What constitutes a good team member?
• What role does diversity play in team effectiveness?
• What is the best configuration of team member knowledge, skills and attitudes?

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is a success.” Henry Ford

A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.

Effective team building strategies can help you build an effective team.

It is easy to think that building a team of experts with extensive knowledge in their field is the way to go, however, it is essential to remember that a team of experts doesn’t make an expert team. 

To create a cohesive and effective team, you need effective team building strategies as you need to bring on board people with both task-related strengths and people skills. Soft skills such as people skills, problem-solving and the ability to give and receive feedback are going to make your team much more capable of overcoming any obstacles or challenges they may encounter along the way, and there will be some!

Finding effective team building strategies

It may come as a surprise, but not everyone enjoys working as part of a team. In fact, as a population, only 25% of people are really good at it! We are social creatures by nature, however, it doesn’t mean that bringing together just anybody will work. There are many ways that collaborations can go wrong if you do not have the right mix of personalities and characteristics. 

Diversity is also an essential factor. It is easy to gravitate towards choosing team members that are like us, understand our humour and enjoy doing similar things, but not having a diverse mixture of team members can have some real downfalls.

Part of creating a strong team is to spend time getting to know each other. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each team member? What set of skills and characteristics do they bring to the team?

It is also a great idea to engage with your team and ask the question: What would an ideal team relationship look like for this team?

This will all depend on the different views of the people on your team, how strongly they feel and how much personal flexibility they have.

In summary, when composing your team aim to pull together a diverse and varied set of individuals. Focus on soft skills and characteristics as well as practical skills and expertise and ensure that your team enjoy working with others as a priority. 

Communication is key to the development of a cohesive team. Asking for their input, making them feel valued, involved and heard is the best way to ensure your team remain positive and efficient. 

To get to know your team, you could look into psychometric testing. This will provide you with in-depth character and personality analysis, which will help you determine what kind of team members you have (or need!). 

Are you intrigued to know more about psychometric testing and team analysis? Check out our workshop available for member’s of the Women In Business Club here. In this incredible workshop, Elaine guided us through how to analyse different characteristics and personality profiles within teams to ensure you have the perfect combination of talent, personality and expertise on your team to help your business flourish.