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With the percentage of new businesses sprouting up steadily in the last few years, the struggle to achieve success becomes much more narrow. Aiming to rise above the more than five million new business applicants in the USA can be a daunting task, with plenty of factors that can affect your path to profit. However, if your business is suited to face all the challenges with all the right people, you can lead a direction towards long-term business success.Â
To achieve this, you’ll need to determine how to build a winning team. A powerful team strives together with cooperation to achieve goals and can be your secret to claiming victory. Effective teams help businesses grow, thrive, and scale properly, which would be impossible for one individual to do alone. By hiring the right people and figuring out how to build a winning team, you can develop a cohesive unit that will see your business through to success.
Here are some proven principles that you can implement to bring together a winning team for your business:
1. Be a great leader
Being a team leader isn’t mainly a supervisory position where employees submit reports. Team leaders can empower members, keep the team accountable, streamline decision-making while maintaining projects to keep moving forward. In understanding how to build a winning team, hiring the right people is vital.Â
However, all efforts are for naught without focusing on providing great leadership. Poor leadership will almost always result in poor, inefficient teams that can’t perform. Therefore, having strong leadership is a vital key to creating a cohesive unit.Â
This is why worldwide investments in leadership training reached $357.7 billion in 2020. To build a winning team, leaders need to be more hands-on to secure cooperation and align a team’s focus. When team members see that leaders are positive sources of inspiration, they become more engaged to work harder to achieve goals.
2. Set goals
When faced with the challenge of how to build a winning team, having a clear purpose is vital. Setting goals and creating a plan are required to define what your team should accomplish. For example, you may have hired great people and beefed up your leadership initiatives, but without a set goal or a plan to execute it, your team can become aimless.Â
Goals provide the direction your team needs to work together to achieve results. Setting goals with measurable milestones can allow you and your team to assess your work progress. Consider setting SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. These SMART goal tools can help you in your goal-setting to attain clarity and focus as your team sets out to fulfill them.Â
3. Work together while valuing individuality
As you move forward along the path to defining how to build a winning team, it’s crucial to remember and respect that each team member is a worthy individual. Every employee has their own perspective with varied life stories, which you should allow to grow. A winning team comprises individuals with unique abilities and gifts that contribute towards achieving your shared goals.Â
High-performing members have a balance of different skills, complementing each other to attain impressive productivity. To achieve this, you need to develop a healthy team culture based on trust. Trusting that your team can accomplish tasks allows them to create more value in their work while contributing to your company with commitment.Â
To highlight your team’s individuality while developing strong team culture, you can:
- Be versatile. Allow each member to do the work according to where they shine, and let them grow from there. Leaders must be able to understand their team’s strong points and weaknesses, so they can complement each other and help each other develop.Â
- Be protective of your team. Develop a protective role of your team members while showing that you are a leader they can easily approach for guidance and approval. Protecting your team members makes them feel more valued, building a more positive and secure working environment.Â
- Be open to spontaneity. As a leader, you should support and encourage your team members’ natural instincts. They must feel free to operate based on their gut while providing them the focus and direction they may need to stay on track.
- Give your team space. Instead of micromanaging to the point of hovering, let your team succeed on their own, with your guidance, of course.
4. Form an action plan
A project management survey identified that seventy percent of organizations experience at least one project failure within their last 12 months. If you don’t want to be part of this statistic, it’s crucial to focus on how to build a winning team. In addition, to ensure that your team becomes effective, it’s essential to have a clear action plan.Â
Good strategy formulation and effective planning are necessary for teams to meet their goals consistently. An action plan is essentially a checklist that outlines the required tasks your team needs to cover. In addition, it details how the goal is intended to be achieved, the responsibilities of team members, the resources required, and identified timeframe, and key performance indicators to evaluate performance.Â
Having a detailed action plan sets your team up for success, providing a clear path to take, technologies to deploy, and possible obstacles to overcome. This can boost your team’s productivity exponentially while keeping your team focused.
5. Empower your team
In formulating the path on how to build a winning team, teamwork becomes a key element to attaining success. Leadership and respecting individuality are vital concepts to maintain, but you need to empower members of your team in order to become one cohesive unit. A highly-effective team can amplify a business owner’s efforts aligned with the vision and goals of the company.Â
Whether it’s developing a good foundation or realizing the goal of scaling up, empowering your team is necessary for your business to achieve greater heights. In the 5E Scale Engine, empowerment is the third component that sets your team apart from functional groups within your organization. From consistent A-players who are up to the task to transforming new hires into A-players and developing a respectful and appreciative culture that leads to progress, empowering your team can get the job done.
6. Put up a shared scoreboard
When you have a well-stocked shop and a clear direction to aim for, it can be advisable to add a bit more challenge to keep everyone on their toes. Everyone has a shared goal, with individual responsibilities based on the action plan. As your team begins to operate, it’s ideal to put up a shared scoreboard to keep your team members on the same page.Â
An external scoreboard makes it easier to track your team’s progress and the individual tasks set within it. Fulfilling the checklist can be a dynamic process. It becomes a visual reminder of everyone’s tasks with a clear indication of your timeline that keeps your team focused on maintaining productivity and efficiency.Â
In contrast, not having a scoreboard provides possible confusion, as members will eventually make up their own measures of success within their tasks. Scoreboards help keep things transparent, allowing the team to know where exactly members are at. Here are things you can keep in mind when developing scoreboards for your team:
- Scoreboards are simple. Scoreboards are not spreadsheets that require time and effort to analyze. They are simple enough to glance at and immediately know where you and your team members are regarding a project.Â
- Scoreboards are for the team members. The scoreboard isn’t a tool primarily used by leadership; instead, it is there for the members of the team tasked with different jobs. Scoreboards provide transparent information and are regularly updated, allowing everyone to assess their own pace.
- Scoreboards operate in real-time. Scoreboards provide information and context of other members’ progress to correlate with one’s own. The information provided is updated in real-time, whether daily or weekly/monthly, for long-term projects. Keeping score by simply glancing at the scoreboard is a way to track everyone’s progress while also being an effective motivator to boost productivity.
7. Maintain everyone's involvement
Even though everyone is a member of the team, each person is still a functioning and emotional individual who can, at times, deviate from the pack. This is why maintaining involvement from everyone in the team is necessary to keep healthy team dynamics going. Leaders should always make sure that everyone participates and gives one hundred percent to the task.Â
In understanding how to build a winning team, it’s vital that each person should know that they are accepted completely by everyone. In addition, each member should be engaged and motivated to work towards milestones to achieve goals. To do so, you should:
- Prepare the workspace. Always make sure that your team has what they need to be productive.Â
- Set boundaries. Setting boundaries is also required to set each team member’s expectations. From maintaining a healthy separation between home and work life to managing the extent of help you can provide, these parameters provide a better understanding for your team members to function better.Â
- Encourage team building. Whether it’s a full day of exercises or simply an occasional lunch-out, encourage activities that can mold your group into a cohesive team.
- Identify and embrace quirks. Each person has a different way of doing things, and while most processes can be set according to standard, some should be accepted if it means allowing people to be who they want to be. Building your team with the foundation of respect enables each member to feel accepted and appreciated while providing the trust they need to excel.
8. Communicate effectively
No matter how tight-knit a team may be, more frequently, these strong relationships can easily be broken apart due to simple miscommunication. We all want to know how our work, behaviors, and practices can affect others, often to the point of encroachment. This can often lead to confusion that eventually breaks down effective ties that make winning teams work.Â
High-performing teams, however, should be able to build a well-founded bond that allows them to communicate effectively with each other. This can resolve issues of expectations when standards are not being met or when a member needs support over a tedious task. In addition, team members should be able to complement each other when it is deserved, with a good level of understanding of where other team members stand.Â
Effective communication within teams can lead to a ten percent increase in employee performance and enhance employee trust, raising productivity by fifty percent.
9. Reward good work
Providing affirmation to a person’s hard work can often mean significantly to a loyal employee. When your team meets milestones and increases productivity, it should be more than righteous for you to show your appreciation. While providing financial bonuses can lead to motivational incentives, you can also offer different ways of expressing your gratitude.Â
An excellent example of this can be delegating a critical task to an effective team member. Taking on the role of making key decisions can give members a sense of authority, enhancing your trust in them. This reflects your keen leadership and appreciation of their work, increasing their acceptance as a valued member of the team.
10. Never let failure overcome your progress
In understanding how to build a winning team, it’s natural to accept that failure can be a pitstop that your team will encounter. Experiencing setbacks can be expected and should be analyzed to know what went wrong. However, you and your team should never dwell on it.Â
Focusing on the negative aspects and effects of going through failure can be a draining experience and is counterproductive to the optimism your team relies on to stay on the path. Instead, you can focus your energies on how you plan to overcome and succeed. These setbacks are unexpected brake checks that, although they may dampen your momentum, can also provide you the proper perspective to become more prepared.
Conclusion
Winning teams combine outstanding leadership, excellent talent, plenty of respect and communication, and lots of hard work. When everyone in the same boat has a level of understanding of the goals they’ve set out to achieve, the experience of going through the process becomes more meaningful for everyone. This develops a well-oiled machine, one that you can entrust to face all the challenges ahead.
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