As the owner of a company, you can put together a collection of the most talented employees in your area. But if you aren’t able to get them to work together as a team, it’ll all be for naught.
You can encourage your employees to work together by appointing a strong manager to guide them along the way. You can also do it by posting inspiring quotes about teamwork all over your office.
But it’s ultimately going to be up to your employees to decide whether or not team success is something that’s important to them. Working together as a team requires each and every employee within a company to sacrifice a little bit of themselves for the greater good.
Are your employees working well as a team right now? Here are ten signs that’ll let you know your team is operating at a high level.
1. Your Team Understands Their Purpose
When you bring a group of employees together and turn them into a team, it’s important for you to let them know what their specific purpose will be. Their purpose might be to:
- Help increase your company’s sales
- Generate ideas for new products
- Launch a service in a new area
Regardless of what your team’s purpose is, they should understand it and, to a larger degree, understand the importance of them working together to serve their purpose. As long as they’re able to do this, team success should follow.
2. They Set Goals and Work to Achieve Them
In addition to understanding their purpose, your team of employees should also come together to set goals for themselves. They should work hard — and work together! — to achieve them, too.
You can provide your team with some general goals that you want them to achieve. But they should be able to come up with more specific goals that will allow them to reach their end goal sooner than later.
3. They Assume Clearly Identified Roles
LeBron James is an amazing basketball player. He could very well go down as the best basketball player of all time.
But can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if someone were to clone him and put five LeBron Jameses on one basketball team? A team with five LeBrons just wouldn’t work!
Likewise, your team isn’t going to work if everyone on it is trying to be the business equivalent of LeBron. You need to find employees who are able to slide into different roles on your team and play their position without getting upset about it.
4. They Know How to Make Collective Decisions
It doesn’t matter if your team consists of five employees, 15 employees, or 50 employees. Anytime you ask more than one person to make a decision together, things tend to get messy.
The best teams know how to come together and make decisive decisions quickly without arguing over them too much. That doesn’t mean that everyone on a team is going to agree with every decision that gets made. But a good team will find ways to come to agreements as a whole.
5. They Employ Winning Strategies to Deal With Conflict
You don’t want the employees on your team to spend all day bickering with one another. That’s not going to lead to team success.
But a little bit of conflict within a team is healthy. Your employees will gel better as a unit when they face conflicts and figure out how to deal with them accordingly.
6. They Celebrate One Another’s Individual Successes
Even though your goal is going to be to have your employees work together as a team as opposed to working as individuals, there will be times when certain individuals stand out.
You’ll have an employee who comes up with an idea that’s so good that you can’t help but recognize them for it. Or you’ll have an employee that closes a huge sale on their own and gets a well-deserved bonus for doing it.
Good teams will celebrate one another’s individual successes without showing the slightest bit of jealousy. They’ll understand that there are going to be times when one team member does something that deserves individual accolades.
7. They Motivate Each Other During Stressful Times
When your team is placed under a great deal of stress, how do they react?
Do they turn to one another for support and figure out a way to deal with a stressful situation collectively — or do they freak out and worry only about themselves during the tough times?
Great teams work to motivate each other during challenging moments. They continue to push one another forward, no matter how hard things might get.
8. They Ask for Feedback and Adjust Their Approach to Doing Business
No team is perfect. There is always room for improvement as far as teamwork is concerned.
Your team should ask you for feedback on a regular basis and take any suggestions you provide for them to heart. They should also be more than open to taking part in online team assessments to evaluate their overall performance as a team.
9. They Genuinely Enjoy Working Together
Does your team enjoy working together so much that they spend time together outside of the office? This is one of the true measures of team success!
That’s not to say that your employees have to spend every waking hour together to be a successful unit. But it does mean that teams that enjoy spending time together both inside and outside of the workplace often function better as a team.
10. They Welcome New Team Members With Open Arms
In a perfect world, you would create a team within your business, turn the team into a success, and then keep the team together for decades to come. But of course, that’s not how business works!
Your team might stay together for a few years. But most people only stay at a job for about four or five years before moving on. As a result, your team is likely going to have team members coming and going all the time.
A truly special team will welcome new team members into the mix with open arms and help them find the role that suits them best.
Make Team Success a Top Priority at Your Company
At this point, sayings like “There’s no ‘I’ in team” and “teamwork makes the dream work” have turned into cliches. But they’re true!
Your company needs to achieve team success if you’re going to be successful. Spend time putting together the perfect team and then keep tabs on them to make sure they’re working well together. It’ll be beneficial for your business in so many ways.