Business teams are assembled to tackle a task, manage a project, find solutions or create future plans. Team members are chosen based on individual expertise, experience, knowledge and the ability to plan strategically. But, putting them together the perfect team does not automatically ensure the success.
Teams fail for a variety of reasons:
- Weak Leader:
The absence of a strong leadership to direct and support a team can quickly lead to failure of the team. A leader is responsible for recruiting and retaining the right employees and mentoring them for the success of his business team. Hire someone who didn’t clearly communicate a well-thought-out strategy to his team of employees creates the less collaboration of work.
- Vagueness:
The lack of firm deadlines and unclear directives negatively impacts on work teams. When a team attempts the function under vague circumstances, the work produced is often of low quality and the company bears the loss of money. Unclear delegation and instructions are the bottlenecks in moving the work forward.
- Poor Dynamics:
Team members need to interact in a productive way. Though each member may be an expert in his field, he also needs to be an expert in communication with fellow team members. Mutual respect is mandatory for a team to maintain cohesion and achieve results comprehensively. If team members butt heads due to mistrust of each other’s capability, targeted results cannot be achieved.
- Incorrect Analysis:
A strategic plan based on market data or other analysis is only as good as that data or analysis. The original vision may be based on certain market conditions or criteria, but if the market changes during the process, the data is no longer valid. The team will fail in its mission not because team members are inefficient, but because the processes are no longer based on the correct data.
- Wasted Time:
Participation in irrelevant conversations, rehashing the old events without learning from them and arriving late or leaving early causes to waste the time. A team that allows individuals to engage in such activities that distract from the mission of the business impairs to production and limits the profits. Do not let these distractions interfere with your team objectives.
Strategies to Avoid Disaster:
It is highly important to understand the reasons of team failure and how to avoid the disaster. Because the failure of a team affects the morale of the employees, besides affecting the organization financially too. For the success of team; some strategies are following:
- Assign collective goals, but individual tasks:
Sometimes it’s just a matter of communication that what you actually want from your team. And, by giving them each their own responsibility, but making them all accountable to the final results. By assigning them tasks in this planned way can remove the chances of a team failure.
- Empower your team to feel mutual respect:
One of the keys to achieving teamwork is encouraging everyone to recognize each other’s strength and to realize that they aren’t a threat, but an asset of yourselves. Implementation of a peer recognition program is an excellent way for your team to acknowledge others’ capabilities and the ways each contributes to overall success.
- Celebrate winning as a whole:
As a manager, you can discourage any feelings of personal entitlement on a team project by rewarding and recognizing everyone who participated equally for the completion of a project. It could be a lunch, a happy hour, an appreciation gift, or a special company-wide shout out.
Read More:-5 Important Functional Areas of Management