Teamwork Archives

The Responsibilities of a Team-Oriented Manager/Supervisor

Jan 31, 2017 Comments

The responsibilities of a team-oriented manager/supervisor requires balancing two different sets of skills with a goal of building teamwork in the department.

At times, this is like a balancing act. On one side of the scale is job skills and on the other side is people skills.

responsibilities of a manager and supervisor

Job Skills

The manager or supervisor needs to plan the direction for the department, set goals and establish standards for quality and productivity. Planning includes allocation of resources and materials for the department. Job responsibilities include control of time, information and costs.

People Skills

On the other side of the scale is people skills. The manager or supervisor needs to understand the responsibilities and develop the skills required to manage and direct people. Teamwork in organizations today is crucial for staying competitive and for continuous improvement. The leader must be able to develop people skills that will foster teamwork.

The Job Skills Balancing Act

Understanding the balancing act required to lead and manage a department is the first step to good management performance. Some people are naturally more skilled at planning and others are better with people.

Before promoting someone to a leadership position it is important to assess their skills and make sure they understand the inherent responsibilities of the job. They must also be motivated to learn all the skills and continuously apply them to improve.

Often and more so in smaller companies, people are promoted to a management or supervisory role with little clarification of the responsibilities and inadequate training. This is a recipe for disaster.

Strengths & Weaknesses

It is important to assess your job and people skills and have a plan for development. Perhaps your need to spend more time planning and analyzing to better communicate with the team. Or do you need to be better at training and coaching people so they are more engaged and productive.

Self-Development Goals

Once you have a better grasp of your development needs you can set goals for personal development as a leader and become better balanced. I suggest working on one skill at a time. By improving one key skill you will experience the benefits and you can then move to another skill.

If you are a leader who has several managers or supervisors reporting to you, take the same approach by assessing the skills of each person. Ask each one to do the same and then compare notes. Set a plan and coach them to success.

Here are some related articles you will find interesting.

Promoting Your Best Performing Employee to Manager

Training and development of employees for improved performance

How to hire & select the right person for the job

Develop a Strategic Plan for Employee Development

Writing a Goal Statement to Change a Behaviour & Habit

How to set and achieve any goal using a goal planning worksheet

How to Inspire Teamwork in Your Organization

Jan 03, 2017 Comments

Every progressive business owner and leader wants to inspire teamwork in their organization or department. But this is easier said than done.

In our training programs Style of Leadership and Team Development and My Team & I, we ask the question “what is the difference between a group and a team?

Undoubtedly, we get the answer that a team has a clear team goal whereas a group does not. While it is true that goals drive teamwork, a group of people working together can also have a common goal. Think of a large group of people working on designing and constructing a building. Everyone has the common goal of making the building, but they do not necessarily work as a team.

The Secret to Teamwork

The crucial ingredient required to boost teamwork is team spirit. Many would argue that team spirit is the result of people working together towards a common goal. This is true if they can work together effectively and autonomously. To achieve this level of performance team members must want to help and support each other. They also need to learn specific interpersonal skills such as active listening, diplomatic disagreement, gently confrontation as well as problem solving and giving feedback,

Self-knowledge and mutual understanding are also crucial elements in building team spirit. This creates greater acceptance and tolerance of others and forms the willingness to help and support one another.

The Leaders Role in Building Team Spirit

It’s the leader or managers’ role to assure that team members develop the interpersonal skills and have a worthwhile and challenging team goal or project.

Team training must include knowledge of oneself and others so that proper team spirit can be generated through training and other types of team activities.

Of course, the leader themselves must also partake of these types of learning and develop the attitude of continuous improvement in both people development and operational matters.

Achieving Higher Levels of Teamwork

When team members learn to help and support each other and work through their differences, greater levels of teamwork can be achieved. Teams that function at higher levels can take on greater responsibility and become more autonomous. This can allow the leader to delegate responsibility and spend more time on strategic issues.

Highly evolved teams can assume responsibilities such as hiring and training new team members, practicing problem solving for continuous improvement and participating in managing an operating budget for their team or department. Teams of this type are often called interdependent or fully functioning teams.

Assess Team Effectiveness

How dependent on their leader are team members? How well do team members know and trust each other? Do they have team spirit? Do they have a common goal? Do the accept and support each other? Can they resolve conflicts on their own? Do they solve problems as a team? Do they practice continuous improvement?

Act to Inspire Teamwork

Rate your team for each item below on a scale of 1 to 5. Where would you like to see your team in six months or a year from now? What can you do to improve? What changes or improvements do you need to make as a leader? You can use the grid below or download this as a form. Have your team complete this as well and compare each others’ perception.

Teamwork Effectiveness Evaluation Worksheet

Item	Criteria	Leaders rating 1 = disagree 5 = agree	Team member 1 = disagree 5 = agree	Gap in perception
1	Team members act independently to complete tasks and make decisions	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5
2	Team members readily help and support each other	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5
3	Team members know and trust each other?	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5
4	Team spirit prevails	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5
5	The team has a common goal or project	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5
6	Team members confront each other positively and resolve conflicts independently	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5
7	The team practices problem solving on their own	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5
8	The team engages in continuous improvement	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5	1 – 2 – 3- 4- 5
	Total score out of possible 40

Set a Goal for Improvement

Get going now with you action plan. Use my goal setting process to work on this. Make it a priority if you want real teamwork and team spirit to grow in your organization or department.

Developing a leadership style to support continuous improvement

Aug 23, 2014 Comments

Continuous improvement is crucial for the ongoing success and growth of any business and organization. Your leadership style can either promote or hinder people practicing continuous improvement. I’ll talk about that in this video.

In a previous article and video, I talked about how to get employees to be more creative and drive continuous improvement. I spoke about three key components, which were the type of person, the level of self-esteem and self-confidence of people and thirdly, the culture of the company and the style of leadership.

The culture of an organization is driven by the values, beliefs and the style of leadership of top management. Thus, the leaders of organizations must evolve in their thinking and leadership style in order to drive continuous improvement from employees.

A participative leadership style is required to promote and support continuous improvement from employees. It necessitates taking a proactive approach to solving problems, rather than being reactive. This means practicing prevention rather than fighting fires.

It also means developing autonomous teams comprised of team members who are mature enough to facilitate problem-solving sessions in their respective teams or department. This requires training on team development, which includes interpersonal communication skills and problem-solving techniques. You cannot expect to just put a group of people together and presume they will work as a team. Just because people get along with each other does not mean that they are working as a team.

Teams need to grow from the stage of dependency to an interdependent state where they function more autonomously. Working this way they are able to step back from the day-to-day tasks and brainstorm to find ways to make improvements and then propose well thought out solutions to management.

A participative leadership style does not mean total democracy in decision-making. There are times when leaders need to take charge and be more autocratic in their style. But there needs to be a balance between controlling everything and having employees participate in decision-making and problem-solving.

Everyone has ideas and experience that they can contribute towards continuous improvement. Certain types of people embrace participating in these activities while others may shy away from it. The challenge is to get everyone to participate and this is why team development and problem-solving training is imperative.

Trust is another crucial element for employee involvement in continuous improvement. Trust needs to be established at all levels, between leaders and employees and also amongst employees and within teams.

Creating a mindset throughout an organization that promotes people practicing continuous improvement takes time and commitment on the part of leadership. Leaders need to assure adequate coaching and support to employees in order to go from simple task execution to continuously finding new and better ways to do things.

Any organization that clearly sees the benefits of performing continuous improvement and makes a commitment to the process can only reap great rewards.

How to get employees to be more creative and drive continuous improvement

Jun 25, 2014 Comments

Continuous improvement and creativity go hand-in-hand. Entrepreneurs and business owners are typically creative people in the business sense and usually craft their businesses from an idea. It often takes a lot of trial and error to develop a winning formula for your business. Even though there are best practices that can be followed from a business strategy and management perspective, each business has its own personality and thus there is really no cookie-cutter approach.

As businesses grow and take on more employees. The business owner can no longer be involved in every aspect in detail of the business. He or she must rely on forward thinking employees who care enough about the business to want to make improvements.

There are three key components that affect the ability of employees to be creative, and continuously improve how they do things.

The first component is their human type. Certain types of people enjoy change and other types prefer keeping things as they are.

The second component is the level of self esteem and self confidence of the person. The higher these elements are in the employee, the easier it is for them to take risks and try new things.

The third component is the culture of the company, based on the leadership style of the business owner and top management. It is not enough to expect people to come forth with suggestions for improvements. The business leader must create a platform for people to engage in continuous improvement discussions so they can draft well thought out proposals to management.

In fact, the essence of teamwork is not only to have the right synergy among team members in order to execute well on a project. Equally important is for team members to be able to meet together and find opportunities for improvement that will keep the organization more nimble and effective.

Even the types of people who don’t like change, often have good ideas for how to improve things. They’re usually reliable dependent workers who you know will perform their tasks in a consistent fashion.

To have all employees contribute to continuous improvement business leaders simply need to organize regular problem-solving or continuous improvement meetings that uses a structured approach that is efficient and gets everyone to participate.

Business leaders can also raise people’s self-esteem and self-confidence by coaching them to do more challenging work and then giving regular positive feedback.

The more that the business leader delegates responsibilities and decision making. The more people will fill engaged and committed to the business and will want to ensure the company success.

If management is going to encourage employees to contribute their ideas for continuous improvement management must act on these ideas or let people know why they can’t. Even with all the new applications for sharing information amongst employees and management, is still in some ways, just like the old suggestion box. People do not see their ideas taken seriously. They will just develop a poor attitude towards management and the attempt to have them participate in idea generation.

In today’s global economy is imperative that every organization utilizes all its resources to continuously improve and find new ways to do things. If your competition is doing it. And you’re not. You are to big disadvantage and risk becoming insignificant to your clients.

Everyone can improve something every day that does not require approval from management. It could be just how customers being served to learning a shortcut on a computer program that will save time. We just need to have the mindset to want to improve and look for opportunities that are all around us.

Stephen Goldberg