In the great hall of social constructs, a workplace team is the one that should most closely resemble a well-oiled machine. It must be a souped-up engine engaged in the determined pursuit of targets – and its cogs and wheels must mesh seamlessly with those of its neighbouring teams in the organisation.
So, if you lead a team, it’s absolutely in your interests to ensure that your unit is constantly honed and developed for the challenges that lie ahead.
Here are some thoughts, strategies and processes that you can apply to the important business of keeping your team tuned up for the foreseeable future…
Or, in modern business parlance, ‘synergy’.
Including too many people in your team who are too similar is to invite disaster. One of the most useful gauges that management theory has hatched to urge leaders to consider the need for diverse personalities in their teams is the Belbin Team Roles model.
Devised by leadership academic Raymond Meredith Belbin, the framework sets out nine archetypes that managers can use to judge whether or not they have a strong enough blend of key qualities and traits that will help their teams perform effectively.
The more flavours are stirred into that blend, Belbin argues, the more likely the team will achieve synergy – a release of collective energy that will deliver results.
Archetypes that Belbin placed in his cast of characters include:
Find descriptions of all nine types at the Belbin company's official website.
We all want to be liked, and we all want to like people – particularly those who will surround us for at least 40 hours per week. But to grant that sentiment too high a priority when you are searching for that hotshot new team member who will deepen your talent bench is a naive error.
According to The Institute of Leadership & Management, a preponderance towards culture fit may lead you to screen out quirky, challenging individuals who could galvanise your team with a touch of creative tension. The border between amiable consensus and imaginative rot is paper thin at the best of times. Why erode it any further?
Instead – as The Institute also notes – work with your team to develop a crystal-clear, “shared understanding” of what success ought to look like, with respect to all the various projects your team has taken on, and its broader mission within the organisation.
Team members will challenge themselves – and each other – to excel in the drive to meet those goals. And when they succeed, they will be bound by a spirit of natural camaraderie in which differences are accepted and valued, and trust is secured.
Determining a life cycle for your team is an ever-changing process that will play out in an open-ended fashion for the whole duration of your stint as team leader.
Individual projects with shorter schedules will require you to add specialist contractors as the work commences, then say farewell once they’ve turned in the results. Ongoing initiatives with longer time frames will lose and gain staff as employees head off for pastures new and create openings for fresh blood.
In the 1960s, management theorist Dr Bruce Tuckman aimed to make sense of this constant ebb and flow with his Five Stages of Team Development: a test that leaders can use to pinpoint which phase of life their team has reached – and where it should go next.
Tuckman named those stages:
The interesting thing about Tuckman’s thought experiment is that some leaders with large teams and a wide range of projects will be at different stages all at once. So at least this will help them see the wood for the trees in terms of arrivals, departures and areas in need of upskilling.
A shrewd leader who is eager to either minimise, or completely swerve around, the nerve-jangling disruption of the Storming stage may want to commit the troops to a group exercise that is isolated from the business – and therefore has no immediate effect on its commercial fortunes.
Of course, this could mean bundling off into a nearby copse and paintballing each other to smithereens. Nothing wrong with that.
But perhaps to retain a smidgen of professional clout, the team-building event may have its roots in the roles that everyone is supposed to perform: a handy way of reinforcing the responsibilities set out at the Forming stage.
For a team of treasurers, this may mean putting on a multimedia presentation on the workings of treasury for other departments – a primer for staff who may not understand the basics, or where the function sits within the wider corporate context.
Even more ambitiously, your team could hold a thought-leadership event for colleagues throughout the profession, compelling everyone to be at their interpersonal best. Allocate roles for these events in the same way you would for a project, and encourage everyone to pull together to impress the relevant audience.
Explain to your team that your door is always open if they want to raise any concerns over skills. Underscore the idea that approaching you for help to bridge gaps in their knowledge is not a sign of weakness, but of strength.
Once a member of your team has come to you with those concerns, look into which training avenue would work best for that employee’s continuous professional development (CPD).
Most importantly, ensure that your team’s CPD doesn’t just revolve around technical knowhow, but taps into softer skills, too. A team will stand or fall on its interpersonal skills (see Tuckman’s Storming stage), and those abilities will play a decisive role not just within your own unit – but how it liaises with teams within your partner organisations.
For details on the ACT’s CPD scheme, click here.
Matt Packer is a freelance business, finance and leadership journalist