Well if these are some of the problems exists, then you certainly needs to revisit your strategy to manage and you need to work towards transforming your team into a high performance teams.
- Building right attitude – Attitude is the foremost trait of any successful individual, team or organization to be successful in long term. With right attitude and approach anybody can achieve success and work in a right direction in minimal timeframe. Attitude is about how you do things, how you perceive any problem and solve them, how you admit your mistakes and works towards improving yourself. You should inculcate the right attitude and at the same time, mentor your team to work with open and positive attitude.
- Team work – You should not be working with the strangers in the same team, right?. You should try to create bonding with the team. Go together, discuss different topics of interests, have small breaks, lunch etc together often. Have brainstorming session with team members on identifying problems and identifying the solution. Create a friendly environment, enable team members to interact and work with each other. Everyone should respect each other opinions, views and thoughts.
- Communication – Communicate effectively with your team. Provide visibility and details of tasks assigned to individuals. Ask them if they are able to understand the tasks and in case of any doubts or query, clarify the same immediately. Keep your team inform about the updates. At the same time you need to be cautious of the fact that you should review what information is suitable for the team. Share goals of each individual, explain each goal and help them understand what they are supposed to do. Explain the expectations of your management, let them think about it and come up with ideas on how can they meet or exceed the set expectations.
- Treat each member differently – Do not impose philosophy of ‘One rule applies to all’. Do not try to create comparisons between different individuals as each individual have their own strengths and weaknesses. Help them improve their weakness and motivate them to keep up building on their strength. Assess the tasks, skills and interest of each individual and allocate work accordingly. Let them choose what they want to do and what they can deliver best. If you give them tasks which do not excite them, they are not going to give their 100%.
- Balance of Direction and Support – You should assess the competency and commitment level of each resource on each assigned tasks. In case you find any gaps in competency or commitment then you should provide adequate Direction or Support respectively. You need to be careful of the fact on how much direction or support you should provide to individuals.
- Motivation – Motivate your team, encourage them to work towards new initiatives, appreciate when someone does a good job, guide them when they make any mistake, help them understand new things, let them be fearless of taking any new challenges and support them whenever needed. This will help you motivate your team and will help them take a leap faster and work in a more efficient way.
- Learn from mistakes – It is rightly said that ‘There is no problem in making mistake rather problem is with making same mistake twice’. Do not hesitate in allowing your team to make mistakes, let them try things and if they make mistakes, guide them on how best these things can be done. Mentor them so that they not repeat mistakes. Nobody should be fearful of trying new things. When somebody tries new things then guide them and help them make the right move.
- Challenge your team – Identify how you can transform ‘Routine Work’ into something ‘Challenging and Interesting’. Bring your team out from their comfort zone and let them use their competencies to do better work in a faster time cycles. Give them new assignment that challenges their existing knowledge, skills and helps them learn new things. Bring healthy competition among the team members, recognize and appreciate good work.
- Constant Feedback – Provide constructive, regular and timely feedback to each individual on their progress. Tell them what they did right and what they did wrong and how they can correct things. Be open with individual and if possible setup one on one with each individuals on a frequent basis. It can be quarterly or monthly depending on the team size
- Importance of Quality – Make your team aware that quality should be part of system, process, mindset and thinking. Quality should be a way of life. Help them understand the importance of doing right thing first time. Help them understand how they can reduce probability of reworks and deliver high quality outputs on a consistent basis.
