The 5 Golden Steps to Build Up a Legendary Team

Teams have immensely helped make history. Everything you see around you, from the Eiffel Tower to Taj Mahal, from the great Egyptian pyramids to the Great China Wall are all pure examples of dreams poured out in reality through joint effort. This also tells us an astonishing fact; the era from which leaders like Buddha and Qin Shi Huang have favored the very concept of team building.

The five steps necessary to form a team to achieve the desired goal(s) are:

1. Set the goal(s)

Teams are only created when there is/are goal(s) to be achieved or some targets to be opted for. A group of qualified and specialized professionals can only be called as a team when they are aiming for something, to attain an objective. If there are no goals/objectives, the professionals would only be a group or a crowd of people who have no sense of direction. Therefore, goals identify a team; it’s the goals which are responsible for differentiating a team from a group. Such is the importance of the goal setting process.

The goals set should not be conflicting, either each other or the set law and should be broken down into daily/weekly/monthly achievable targets so that the team’s performance as a whole can be measured and the bottlenecks are identified. The importance of these shorter term targets can be understood by an example. Suppose you are selected as a player for Green Bay Packers (NFL) and you are told that all the team aims is to hold that Super Bowl trophy. What would you do without a proper laid game plan, positions on the field, the league strategy and daily practices? The result, a team doomed to anarchy.

2. Study your labor

Studying and analyzing a team’s members is as necessary for the team’s survival as oxygen to mankind. If goals identify a team than team members define the team. You cannot make a team by having clear goals and targets set in mind but involving no other coworker, now can you? It is the members who work together day and night and their collective efforts are recognized and entitled as a ‘team’. Members act as the bloodline for a team; they are the ones to be questioned in the case of failure and rewarded in the case of an expected success.

Suppose you are the regional head of a large multinational. You are told to decrease the marketing budget by 20% for the coming period. Would you contact the marketing department to start acting accordingly or would you go running to the directors to solve the problem? The answer is obvious to everyone reading but if you think over it, then why did you choose to stick with the first option? The answer is that you first studied your labor and then made a decision.

Studying the potential team members not only involves studying one’s educational background or experience working with a team. It isn’t that you are supposed to recruit someone, no! Studying your labor itself covers a long list which includes:

• Analysing the potential member’s motivational levels
• Measuring success rate the potential member has been scoring by working with a team before
• Reading the level of dedication, commitment and co-ordination displayed by the potential member while working with a partner(s).

3. Arrange the selected, select the arranged

A team, like an organization, is divided upon different layers of hierarchy or departments ranging from the most experienced, responsible for taking responsible decisions, to the most motivated, active working individuals necessary to carry out all the day-to-day work. A house building team may be divided into electronics, decoration and flooring departments or there may be a leader assigned to the team who would check the team’s everyday performance and match it against the set targets. Once you have studied your labor and shortlisted potentially important team members, it is important you tell them where would they fit in? This is a very time-consuming and an analytical activity which requires experienced professionals to arrange the available human resource in such a manner that it is ascertained the goals are achieved.

Not every shortlisted individual can be arranged. If the individual is of the belief that ‘Doing It Alone’ is the best way to complete a task, than it is very certain that he/she may be the reason why a team never got out of its Storming phase. Therefore, it is very important to arrange such potential team members who may only contribute positive energy to others and that their every move promotes team work. Once an individual seems to perfectly fit in the available blank spots, only than it is important that he/she is considered as a ’member of the family’.

4. Assign duties and delegate achievable targets

Now we are on the stage when everything is sorted out; the goals, the labor, who will stay and who would not. The next step should be very easy to grab; to assign duties to those who are arranged and selected. This is also an important stage which may not require a lot of time because the labor is already studied deeply but may require a lot of concentration jotting down all the responsibilities and duties to be assigned. You cannot assign the responsibility of promotion to the Software Developer so this is where the second step in the line comes in handy; you are already aware of each member’s forte.

The second part of the sentence however, may as well be time engaging. What would you do if your goal is to pass the high school exams? Exactly! You would draw up daily or weekly schedules. At first you would jot down the total subjects, the number of days available and decide on the days to be left for revision. Than you would calculate the total number of chapters you have to study, the number of hours allocated to each subject and finally, you would set your weekly targets. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

5. Continually assess the team’s performance and the milestones reached

The last stage represents the Performing phase; you have to measure the team’s performance. Continuing the above example, what would you do after the end of Week 1, or to make it sound a little more complex, at the end of Week 3? The answer is rather simple; you would calculate the distance covered so far towards ending the syllabus and starting revision. In other words, you would assess your performance. Same is the case with teams. After Week 1 or Month 1, the team’s performance should be measured and the distance covered on the long road to success should be calculated. This helps make sure deadlines and targets are met if not overlapped and so the team ends its journey swiftly without going through any hurdles along the way.