Building a successful team is partly a matter of setting clear goals, benchmarks and guidelines, and partly a matter of fostering effective personal relationships among the people you select for the team.

Whether you choose a team for a short-term project or as a long-term working group, you need to be very clear about what you expect the team to accomplish.

Teams work best when management clearly communicates objectives and the strategies needed to achieve them. Team members also need to be clear about their own roles and the roles of other team members.

In 1965, B.W. Tuckman, a writer on group behavior, described a typical life cycle for a team. The four stages of the life cycle are: forming, storming, norming and performing.

Forming

When teams form they go through an initial phase of setting ground rules, clarifying goals and starting to rough out the roles team members will play. This stage is characterized by both excitement over the task ahead, and anxiety about how and whether it can be carried out successfully. Team members are tentative about making any practical decisions and tend to focus on big issues.

Typically, no measurable results are achieved in this phase and a business is effectively losing money while the team gets its bearings. As a manager, you want to keep the forming stage as short as possible, and you can do this by communicating very clear goals to the team and mapping out clear and realistic strategies and stages for achieving them. A detailed project plan will help. Of course, as the team gets up and running they may want to modify the plan.

When Tuckman formulated his stages in 1965, teams were typically expected to become productive within a few weeks. These days, a team will often need to start producing some results within days.

Of course, not all teams are formed for a specific project. Small business teams may work as a looser, more generalized unit over a number of years. However, they are still working towards several different sets of long-term goals, which need to be clearly formulated. Every time a member leaves or joins the team, the group will go through a stage of reforming. Roles will be reshuffled and, as a manager, you will need to intervene to ensure that everyone is well informed.

There can be several teams, even within a small workforce. You may want to form special purpose teams or ‘hot groups’ to tackle special tasks.

Storming

In the storming phase, teams go through a turbulent and sometimes argumentative process of questioning goals, roles, and responsibilities. Team members start to establish personal relationships through a process of trial and error.

If this phase goes badly, cliques may form within a team, or individuals may withdraw into themselves. You can work against this by reinforcing overall goals. Try to develop a team culture where people ‘work the problem’ rather than focus on personalities, identifying faults, or assigning blame. Teams work best where there is a non-threatening and open environment, where individuals can raise issues without having them dismissed out of hand. Destructive criticism is a real killer of team effectiveness.

You can promote good team relationships by:

• Modeling positive behavior.

• Setting clear ground rules for the way team members behave with each other.

• Insisting that all opinions be respected.

• Discouraging overly competitive behavior.

• Refusing to reward one-upmanship.

Businesses generally do not make money during the storming phase, so try and keep it as short as possible.

Norming

During the norming phase, the team starts to get into the rhythm of working together. Ground rules are relatively clear to everyone, and the team can start to be productive and make money for the business.

A danger in this phase is that individuals may start to agree too readily with each other. Remind team members that analytical and critical thinking is still necessary and that disagreement is valuable where it identifies issues.

Ideally, team members will start to offer and accept constructive criticism and the team will start making effective decisions. Keep an eye on progress by scheduling meetings, getting reports and monitoring progress against the benchmarks that were laid out initially.

Performing

Performing, as the name suggests, is the phase in which a team is most productive. Team members have developed an easy familiarity with each other and operate efficiently according to unspoken norms.

At this phase, your management role is to monitor and reward. Applaud good work, encourage initiative, and suggest minor and ongoing improvements.

One danger for long-term teams is that they can slip out of the performance phase. Success does not always breed more success. Teams may develop ways of working that suit one set of problems and then continue to use them as a kind of habit. As business conditions change, the team can become less productive. As team members get frustrated that they are no longer performing as they would like, good personal relationships can deteriorate into recrimination and infighting.

Management guru, Peter Drucker, points out that there is more than one type of team.

For example, there are teams that operate like a baseball team, or a surgical team in an operating theater. Every member of the team has their own special skill and is responsible for their own area of expertise. Fielders don’t tell the pitcher how to pitch. A surgeon doesn’t help the anesthetist or tell them how to do their job.

A baseball-type team suits an environment where everyone is very clear about the way business is done. It is a relatively inflexible way of working, but - on the positive side - the skill of the team members is relatively easy to measure and value.

Other teams operate more like a medical team dealing with a 3 a.m. hospital emergency. Everyone still has clearly defined roles, but team members back each other up if necessary. However, the team is under the strict overall control of a ‘coach’.

Businesses currently tend to favor a third type of team, which is more like a doubles team in tennis, or a jazz combo. There is no overall leader and team members back each other up, swap roles and improvise.

This kind of team is well suited to a rapidly changing business environment where teams need to show flexibility. It is also suitable for a small business, which may not have experts to cover all skill areas and where team members may have to fill in for each other at short notice.

This team has the most developed internal communications. All relevant business areas talk to each other. The designers, marketers and technicians are all represented on the team, and have their say at all stages of a project. This is a way of maximizing the team’s collective expertise and making sure that all issues are covered.

Small and family businesses often do not have specialists for every job role. If you are running a small engineering company, for example, you may find that you or other technical people are also making marketing decisions.

When you form a team, consider whether you need to hire or contract someone with special skills – or perhaps a special blend of skills.

Recruitment of outsiders can be a big issue in a family business. On the one hand, family members may perceive newcomers as intruders. On the other hand, employees may be reluctant to take up employment in a firm where they suspect that the boss’s nephew will be promoted over their head, regardless of performance.

The main team-building issue for a family business is that two teams are competing for attention. The family is a team of sorts, with its own agenda, history, likes and dislikes, bonds, and enmities.

As a manager, your challenge is to get family members to forget about the family ‘team’ issues and concentrate on immediate business goals. It’s about getting two brothers to stop thinking like brothers for a while and put on role hats that carry labels like ‘marketing’ and ‘technical’.

But you can work towards this goal with familiar strategies – by restating business goals in clear terms and getting people to focus on them, and by modeling and insisting on professional and constructive behavior.

Basically, distract people from subjective issues by getting them to refocus on objective goals. To be useful, goals need to be clear and measurable; supported by the people who implement them; achievable; set against a time frame; backed up by detailed implementation plans; revised as circumstances change; and part of an overall strategy.

Family businesses may also find tensions arise when team members take on roles that they are not used to playing as a family member. This may occur if, for example, a junior family member has a high degree of technical expertise and gets promoted over someone senior in the family. Once again, the challenge is to remind people of the business issues.

A team is likely to need:

• A co-ordinator, who manages the team as an overall group.

• A critic, who exposes gaps between objectives and performance.

• A creative person, who comes up with new angles and fresh ideas.

• An implementer, who makes sure that things happen as planned.

• A liaison person who keeps in contact with people outside the group, gives out information on the team, and channels feedback.

• A team builder who helps foster the right team spirit.

One person may fill more than one of these roles. Ideally, the role should match the person’s natural inclinations, but there is no reason why team members cannot be stretched and asked to develop into new areas. Of course, not everyone will have a talent for creative thinking or the gregarious and good-humored personality that makes some individuals good team builders. And special issues are likely to arise if a very junior family member gets a role such as ‘co-ordinator’.

As a manager, you need to make these roles explicit and set performance benchmarks. Once again, setting objective guidelines will help minimize family politics, which tend to be based on subjectivity.

Focusing on goals can also help you deal with troublemakers. Some people may bring unhelpful personality traits into a team. For example, insecure people may seek recognition by demanding excessive support and reassurance from other group members. Aggressive personalities may tend to criticize others in a destructive way, while refusing to suggest alternatives. Negative thinkers may continually harp on one issue to the exclusion of all others.

When you adopt a ‘jazz combo’ or ‘tennis doubles’ style of team you implicitly accept a ‘first among equals’ style of leadership. This means the team is treated as a pool of shared talent, where people feel comfortable to freely express their doubts, raise questions and suggest solutions. It does not, however, mean that you give up the right to make the final decision on important issues, or that no decisions will be made unless the team achieves a consensus. It just means that the team functions as a way to identify and offer evaluations on all issues and options.

You can foster a free exploration of ideas by not intervening too early or too frequently in the team’s investigation of a problem. Keep your preferred solutions to yourself and avoid creating ‘yes men’. Respect the team’s efforts by considering all the options they suggest, even if you decide not to go with them. The team exists to give you the grounds for the most informed decision possible.

And it’s also worth remembering that teams are not always the best way of solving a problem. Sometimes it is better to leave a problem in the hands of one capable and talented individual. Using the baseball analogy, if a problem requires knowing how to pitch, don’t form a committee of outfielders to advise the pitcher.

Some research has indicated that teams do not always outperform individuals as decision makers. An individual may outperform a team where the individual is clearly more competent than other group members.

Research also indicates that individual decisions may be better than team decisions if the team meets only a few times. This makes sense, given that in initial meetings the dynamics of a group would not have been worked out. An individual may be able to get to the point more effectively.

However, research has also found that teams tend to outperform individuals if they meet over a longer period of time. And many problems absolutely require a team approach, as they call for a range of expertise that no one individual has.

“Coming together is a beginning.  Coming together is progress.  Coming together is success.”

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