5 Tips To Build Your Best Teams

A key responsibility of team managers is to figure out how to build successful teams that align core skills and individual roles well and knows how to collaborate effectively. It’s essential when creating teams that managers consider the skills they need, personalities required to fulfill the slots to the fullest, the resources at hand, and the resources needed. How do they build a harmonious, high-performing team? Here are 5 ways to ensure managers put together a successful team:

1. Hire the Right Talent

Finding the right people that are a perfect fit for your company is not a simple task. When it comes to hiring the right people, finding candidates with the right soft skills and competencies is just as crucial as possessing a specific hard skill or experience. For a well rounded team, managers should also pursue candidates with diverse styles, perspectives, and strengths. The challenge, however, is that finding soft skills is much more difficult than finding hard skills. But personality assessments like the Caliper Profile are a valuable tool to uncovering and understanding your employees’ inherent strengths and motivations.

Leveraging the Caliper Profile to build teams allows managers to assess a candidate’s attitudes, behaviors, and performance at work. Roughly 82% of companies use some form of pre-employment assessment test during the hiring process, but that doesn’t mean they don’t also prove to be worthwhile beyond hiring. By including these assessments in team-building efforts, managers can identify the best people to join their teams.

Some key characteristics to look for in successful team players:

• Goal-oriented: The most effective team players set, implement, and track goals to increase productivity and efficiency.
• Committed to their roles: Individuals working in roles based on their key strengths are often highly motivated employees.
• Open-minded: Finding candidates who can adjust roles and responsibilities due to the needs of a project or task are crucial to the success of any team. In addition, team members who are interested in challenging their skills are open to learning and growing their career.
• Diverse perspectives and experiences: Since diversity tends to encourage creativity and innovation, teams who possess a broad spectrum of experiences and opinions can perform to their fullest potential and lift individuals up along the way.
• Shared culture: Whether your candidates share a likeness in company culture or group culture, teams who share the same mission or set of values are often more motivated.
• Responsibility and accountability: When teams share a set of values and goals, each team member can be held to the same standard.
• Clear communicators: Good communicators are able to easily explain their ideas in ways that make sense to others. Also, good communicators can listen and receive feedback better to meet the goals and mission of the company.

2. Encourage Transparency

It’s essential to foster transparency in order to improve every layer of your team’s communication channels. This can range from how teammates distribute and discuss assigned tasks, to how others voice their opinions and thoughts in meetings. Encouraging a streamlined and open channel for collaboration and feedback will build trust, open up lines of communication, and identify any gaps or obstacles that need to be addressed.

In addition, encouraging constructive feedback within teams and managers allows communication to become a two-way street and helps to improve the overall function of the team. It creates a safe space for team members to speak up — both knowing they will be heard when they have a suggestion or concern, but also know that they won’t be harshly criticized by their teammates based on the communication expectations and guidelines that have been set.

3. Set Clear Goals

Once a manager selects the perfect teammates and sets communication standards, the next vital step in productivity and effectiveness is that managers must set clear team expectations and goals. Whether it’s a large project or small task, each team member should know exactly what their responsibilities are, which objectives they need to meet, and the end goal or desired outcome for the project or task.

Without setting systematic goals, teams can fall short of the intended outcomes because they aren’t able to see the bigger picture and decide how to best utilize their resources and most valuable assets to achieve their goals. Each teammate must understand how their work contributes to the overall outcome. Those who are uncertain about their role or how it serves the end goal won’t be able to perform their best work. It may help to prepare a detailed outline for each position on your team, for a project, or detail how the team should function together over time if they aren’t project-based but an ongoing task force or department. The key is that everyone knows precisely their responsibility and how it contributes to the bigger picture.

4. Value Each Role

With each team member bringing something unique to the table, treating each role as an essential part of your operation is crucial to how your teams will operate. Each member should always feel like their job matters, without ever hesitating as to why they are on the team. By implementing a sense of purpose within each employee, performance and engagement increases.

On the flip side, when employees feel that their role lacks value or doesn’t make sense for the team, they risk disengagement and low morale. These things make it harder for them to complete their tasks and perform to their abilities. With a clear view as to why they’re vital to the success of the team, your team members can maintain the motivation and energy required to complete their work and perform to their strengths.

5. Welcome Strong Leadership

A successful team starts with an adaptive leader who can build bridges and distribute employees into positions that best match their strengths. Adaptive leaders have the ability to facilitate communication and help individual members align with the needs of their team and organization. By displaying a leadership style that focuses on shared values and encourages mutually beneficial interactions, any manager can help individuals unify into a dynamic, cohesive team.

Building the right team takes time. Selecting, organizing, and developing a team that is committed to working together to achieve both the goals of the group and organization is not easy, but with the right leader in place, each team can execute the organization’s strategy through values-based coordination, communication, and collaboration.

At Caliper, we want to help you build better, successful teams within your organization. With our dynamic expertise, we can help you come up with better solutions to build collaboration and teamwork, while meeting the goals of your organization. Get started today to learn more about the ways Caliper can help you build and develop your teams.