How to create an effective team. Vision, mission and definition of core competencies.
In this series of articles on building an effective team, we will talk about creating a vision, mission, and the necessary resources to move the team towards the goal. You will learn how to organize a team of productive employees, create a culture and get them to work effectively with each other.
Next, we'll show you how to allocate work and prioritize your efforts so you can focus on the things that matter most to your organization. How are you going to motivate people, inspire them and develop their abilities. So let's get started.
Building an effective team
One of your most important responsibilities as a leader is to turn your team into a highly effective team. And for this, there are seven elements that you need to combine:
- You must set the direction. You must set out a vision of what this organization will be like in three to five years. Do you also need to help the team understand what your mission is? Why does the organization exist? What is the position of the team in the company? After you have formulated the vision and mission, try to think bigger and think about your customers. Finally, define a strategy for how you are going to achieve this vision.
- You have determined the direction, now you need to collect and distribute resources. You must formulate your resource needs. What resources do you need and why do you need them? After that, you must present a convincing business case in order to secure the necessary funding.
- Once you have identified the required resources, you must assemble a team. You must identify the skills that are relevant and necessary to achieve your vision. You have to find people who can help you achieve that vision, people with the right skill set. Once you have them together, you should think about how you are going to organize their work together.
- Then you must distribute the work and prioritize your efforts. You will have to think about how to balance the work between team members. How to set goals for them that are realistic and achievable. And finally, prioritize your efforts so that you focus on the things that matter most and do them well.
- You have set priorities, now you must execute the plan, which includes making managerial decisions . This is more about you as the leader of the team. Then you have to think about your subordinates, how are you going to motivate them, inspire them, get the most out of them on a daily basis, which includes thinking about how you are going to empower them to do their job? How are you going to empower them and make decisions?
- Then give them feedback on their work and resolve any conflict that may exist between them and other team members or between them and you and make sure everything goes smoothly.
- Finally, you need to look at the development of your people in the long run. How are you going to develop their skills? How are you going to deal with the weak performance of individuals and bring their abilities up to the average level? How are you going to create challenging tasks in which people can become better performers than they are now?
When you look at the seven elements of building an effective team, you can see a really interesting dynamic where one element connects to another and allows your team members to perform even better than if you just focused on one of them. As far as setting the direction and setting out the vision and mission, your people will understand where they are going. They will understand how they personally fit into the larger whole and how they can contribute to achieving that vision.
Further, in terms of gathering and distributing resources, your people will have everything they need to succeed. There is nothing more frustrating than being asked to complete a task but don't have the right tools and resources to do it. If you choose the right team, they will be able to work with each other more effectively.
If you properly allocate work and prioritize, people will feel like they are being treated fairly. That they carry no more burdens than any of their colleagues. This prioritization will allow them to focus their efforts on achieving the goals that are most important to realizing this broader vision.
If you execute your decision plan well, you will act decisively and take risks, but if you allow your team to act in the same way, they will be able to see progress and the results of all their hard work. Then consider their motivation. This will help empower them and improve the efficiency of the entire organization. People come to work because they want to grow and they want to develop. If you focus on how you motivate them and understand what excites them, you will unlock their potential.
Finally, if you're really thinking about team development, you must empower your people. You must create opportunities for them to grow and then motivate them to develop their skills. If you can take all seven elements of effective team building and link them together, the results will not be long in coming.
Setting direction for an effective team
As you set the direction for your effective team, you need to articulate both the vision and the mission of the organization. A vision gives a clear picture of where you are going as an organization. It defines who you want to be in three to five years.
When you formulate a vision statement, it should be something ambitious yet realistically possible. You need an ambitious part so that the team has something to strive for. But if it is unrealistic to accomplish, the team will realize that the goal is impossible to achieve and will not stick to your vision.
The vision must also be something worthwhile and capable of winning people's commitment. It should resonate on an emotional level. Finally, this vision should be brief. You do not need to paint it on several sheets, as this can only confuse you and the whole team.
After you have set out the vision, you also need to set out the corresponding mission. A mission is a statement that is a cultural reflection of the organization's values, beliefs, and philosophy. In the mission, you need to clearly articulate how your organization creates value for your customers or for the organization as a whole.
The mission should be clear, concise and understandable to all employees at all levels of your organization. It should also be clear enough that outsiders can clearly understand how your team contributes to the company's business. You must clearly state what business the organization is in. Also, the mission should be formulated in such a way that it can serve as a rallying point for the people in your organization.
Now let's talk about the process of creating a vision and mission for your team. To begin, gather interested parties in one room. They can be the most productive, employees, your deputy, your bosses and others. Find a time when all of them will not be loaded with priority projects and other urgent tasks. They should be open and ready to brainstorm.
Stand near the board and ask the group some questions. Your task is simply to capture all thoughts and prompt them what will contribute to the formulation of the vision and mission. For example, you can ask people: “What value do our customers get from interacting with us?”, “What sets us apart from our competitors?”, “Where do we aspire to be in three to five years?”
Then it is important to let them have their say and do their best to record everything that is said on the board. Right now you are just in input mode. Once the group has answered some of these questions and you feel like people have had their say, take a break and then look at the board and look for terms and concepts that are repeated over and over again.
These common themes are the ones that are at the heart of your vision and mission. Take these general terms and write them on a blank piece of paper and have everyone look at them and decide how you can turn these terms into a clear and simple statement. Turn it into something people can react to.
So it's not difficult to formulate a vision and a mission, you just have to bring interested employees into the room, ask them the right set of questions, document all their thoughts and ideas, find common themes, and then turn it into something clear, easy to understand and compelling enough. . Because that's how you ultimately set the direction for your team.
Once you have a clear and compelling vision and mission statement, and in order to take your team to the next level of performance, think about how you can create a shared purpose for the team and how that shared purpose can drive behavior.
What is a common goal? As we have already written, the mission is an expression of why the company exists, how it behaves every day and how it creates value. And again, this is a clear and simple statement about the existence of the team and its purpose. Combine that with a vision, focusing on where you want to be in three to five years. This is the destination.
Then you take the vision and mission, combine them, and then think more broadly about your clients and how you can involve them in achieving that mission and that vision. That's what a common goal is. The overall goal is the connection between your team and the clients you serve, and again, it doesn't matter if those clients are external or internal. This is how you will interact with them.
Definition of core competencies
Once you have defined the vision and mission of your organization, you should be able to link them to the initiatives you are about to implement. Otherwise, it will be mere words that no one follows, and you will end up following a strategy that is incompatible with what you are aiming for. Thus, you must first identify your core competencies because they will help you understand where you should be competing and the types of initiatives you should be developing.
Core competencies are what your organization does better than anyone else. A very simple framework can be used to assess how you should develop your core competencies and how they relate to the initiatives you intend to take on.
To do this, you look at the first core competency, let's say your brand, and your ability to use that competency in the market from a low to a very high level in terms of how important that competency is to driving this initiative.
Then you look at your second key competency, which is not dominant, but is next in importance, and you look at it the same way, from low to high. Once you've done everything, you can visualize this on a map that will show you if you should promote your initiatives or not.
In cases where none of the competencies are relevant to the implementation of a particular initiative, you are in the Offside zone. You should not implement initiatives where these core competencies are not relevant. Initiatives where both competencies play a large role will be given priority.
You will also have situations where your first core competency will be the most relevant and you should implement such initiatives. Where your second core competency is relevant, you can consider these initiatives, but they won't be given as high a priority as those using your first core competency.
Creating strategic filters
Once you have a good idea of which initiatives are the most prioritized, you will need to move on to the next stage of prioritization. It is the strategic filters that will be the criteria for evaluating your initiatives, some of them will be qualitative, and some will be quantitative.
For example, we might have strategic filters that answer the following questions: "Is this initiative helping us grow internationally?" "Is this product helping us grow with a specific customer segment?" shopping? " Either criteria are the most important to achieve your organization's goals.
You may also have some quantitative filters, such as the present value of a particular initiative, or the return on your investment and what you get from that initiative. You'll create this set of filters to evaluate your initiatives, and later run all of your initiatives through these filters to see how they stack up against each other. By doing this, you have almost completed the cycle of strategic planning.
You have defined your strategy, you have formulated your vision and your mission, you have understood how strong your organization is and where it is “out of the game”. Based on your core competencies, you have formulated your strategic filters to evaluate the initiatives you are going to pursue and then prioritize. The resulting list of priorities should guide your organizational structure, as well as resource planning, depending on how you will implement your initiatives.
Once you have determined the organizational structure, you can start thinking about your team members and where they fit best based on their individual abilities within that organizational structure. So by making sure you strategize, then evaluate organizational structure, management initiatives, and then organize human resource planning, you will help yourself in building an effective team.
Comments
Post a Comment