AbdulTech 
ECL Ghana | Effective Team Work
There are no effective teams with ineffective leadership. Raise your hand if you believe that management is the starting point for efficient and productive work processes.
Even if your team is adaptable and completes projects without issue, you may still require inspiration to take your team to the next level.
This article will provide you with 9 strategies that will almost certainly improve your team’s efficiency and collaboration.
Strategies For Making Your Team Run More Smoothly
1 What is the goal of your team?
Ascertain that everyone on the team understands why the team exists and what value they bring to the organization.
2 What exactly is success?
It’s critical to define what “success” means for the team early on in the process – and how you’ll measure it.
You’ll never know when to celebrate if you don’t have clear goals.
3 When are we going to finish?
Make sure that the team’s tasks/projects are defined in such a way that it is sometimes possible to make a checkmark and say. Keeping tasks “open” saps the team’s energy and eventually leads to frustration.
It is preferable to divide larger projects or tasks into smaller components, not only to track progress, but also to provide the mental and emotional relief of completing a task.
4 Do not move the finish line.
As a team manager, it is critical to clarify when something is an addition (for example, a new task or a new challenge), as well as to point out when team members have not completed what they set out to do.
A team’s energy can be sapped by a variety of factors, including the realization that they have almost reached their goal only to discover that this is not the case. Instead, draw a line in the sand and state clearly when a task is new.
5 Defined tasks – Delineated Responsibilities – Delineated expectations
It’s critical to ensure that everyone on the team understands what they’re supposed to do. Assigning multiple people to do the same job almost always results in confusion, frustration, conflict, and missed deadlines.
6 Establish a standardized reporting system.
It is critical to have a standardised reporting system in place in order to track the progress, achievements, bottlenecks, and problems within a team. It makes no difference what system you use as long as everyone is on the same page. It’s perfectly fine if each team member sends an email every day with an update on his or her progress.
However, it is not acceptable if half of the team reports through a task management system, tracking time and progress there, while the other half sends emails or fills out excel sheets. It makes it impossible to get a structured overview of what is going on, and it frustrates team members who are “following the rules.”
7 Set up a feedback loop
A team’s information does not flow by itself. It must be a proactive, conscious process.
Make sure there are clear channels for information distribution within the team. To avoid information overload, create a Slack channel, hold daily/weekly status meetings, and create a guide for when to email people directly and when to cc other team members.
8 There is always a hierarchical structure.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that your team has a flat structure. No, you don’t. There may or may not be a formalized hierarchy, but there will undoubtedly be an informal hierarchy.
This does not have to be a negative thing, and it is not something that should be highlighted and hung on the wall. There is no need to wallow in it – but as a team manager, you must be aware of the existence of a social and professional hierarchy in order to effectively navigate your team.
9 Show your support for your team.
Sometimes a team isn’t working as well as it should. As a team manager, you must take this seriously and investigate what is causing the problem in order to mitigate the situation. Here are a few examples of potential issues:
- Have you assigned the appropriate responsibilities to the right people?
- Are there administrative or other organizational constraints impeding your team’s ability to complete their tasks efficiently?
- Have you been specific enough in your task definition?
- If bad relationships develop on your team, you must take action and possibly remove someone from the team.
Conclusion
Ultimately, good team management entails communication, structure, planning (most people despise surprises), and expectation clarification.The first step in increasing team effectiveness is to ensure that everyone is on the same page, that everyone is heard, and that the team as a whole is working toward the same goal.
If you work with the implementation of IT solutions in your organization, you are probably aware of the importance of corporate culture in ensuring a successful implementation.
