Managing teams: From theory to practice.

Having high performance teams is one of the keys for a successful business, someone would dare say otherwise? obviously not. So the next question is what to do to not leave to chance the success of the teams? Let’s see the theory.

Theory

According to business literature, what the shareholders of a company should do it is, choose the leader or leaders, with the right leadership style for the situation, to take over the challenge to optimize the performance of the team, and this optimized performance is achieved through a procedure that, simplifying, includes:

a) Involve the team in the definition of goals.

b) Show the way and building the commitment, according with the leadership style that has been chosen by shareholders, ranging from authoritarian to visionary.

c) Give plenty of feedback, better with specific metrics to help the team moving forward.

In my opinion, the recipe is not wrong, but I also think that because wanting to apply the theory sometimes leaders forget the basics.

Practice

In my experience, the key for having successful teams, lies in three simple aspects that are trust, respect and communication that sometimes exist, sometimes don’t, in a company and that define their culture. I know it may seem obvious, but I would like the reader to wonder if something so simple it is the most usual in business.

Trust

In my experience, trust is the basic material from what any team is done, but: How many times do we care to promote it among our teams?

It is not difficult to see how mistrust reigns if, for example, the sales and financial departments must work together in a team to tackle a project and how that constant questioning among colleagues, it is often encouraged by political games very common in corporate life. Fostering distrust is the main mistake in team management. Distrust is toxic, produces slow teams, which do not make decisions and therefore do not get results because the team members are more concerned about safeguarding their backs that looking for solutions.

Respect

This leads to the next key point, which is essential in a team, that is respect: Can a team work if members do not respect each other?

No matter how good the leader is, my answer is no. Out of respect, I understand recognizing the strengths of the other members of the team, and therefore the lack of respect is the negation of the same, and in my experience, lack of respect is often misunderstood with a demanding professional environment , although in reality that is rarely the case. Disrespect creates a destructive spiral between team members which is an obvious waste of resources. I think that for practical reasons and not just for moral values, companies should promote respect and should be very active against those who do not respect their colleagues.

Communication

Last but not least, the communication, and I mean communication between team members, in other words that they speak between them openly, although it may sound as shocking, many times team members are not speaking directly and prefer triangulate the conversation through the leader. The most obvious benefit of increasing the amount of internal communication is the speed with which things are moving within the team, but it is not the only benefit, communication helps creating trust as an extra benefit.

Finally, and here are my thoughts:

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to have a high performance team delivering results without a culture of trust, respect and fluid communication within the group and ensuring that, it is the first mission of a good leader.

How demanding the company has to be in creating this culture of teamwork is perhaps for another post.