Assembling a High-Performance Team

A team doesn’t just happen. An effective team is designed, built, and managed. Carefully designed teams have a sense of unity and identification… team spirit, if you will. The best time to ensure a project’s success is before you even get started. Especially if you are the leader. Consider these seven guidelines before you even think about communicating the project to your team, and your management work as the leader will be minimized.

Set a clear goal

Giving a vague assignment is a sure way to failure. The objective for the project needs to be clear. How does your team know if it has achieved what it set out to do? There should be no question about what success looks like.

Unify the team

Even with a clear goal, there will be confusion. As your project gets underway, each team member will get their own vision of how that objective is manifested. So also plan on getting agreement on the vision up front. With a common vision, your team will set aside their own agendas and ideologies for the sake of achieving this collective goal. Then later, when the team comes to a fork in the road in making a decision, they will be able to easily and unanimously agree to take the route that will lead to the best outcome for the entire team. So get unified commitment via a shared vision at the beginning. After all, your team is not just a collection of individuals. It is an entity of its own.

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