One of the more difficult moments is when a team first meets

One of the more difficult moments is when a team first meets and tries to figure out what they are supposed to do and how they will work together. You have just been assigned to a new team, but after all the members arrive at the first meeting you find no one really wants to say much and you fear this team has a good chance of failing. If your goal is to help make this group a high-performance team, what strategies would you recommend to get them kick-started and on their way to being effective?

Solution

In organisations, it is a common scenario for people from different, unrelated backgrounds and various organisational departments to come together and form a team. A new team is formed when a project requires contribution from different departments and expertise of their respective representatives. If I was assigned to a new team where I figured out that none of the team members have much to say to each other and there is a high chance of the team failing in the project, I would have taken the following steps to help make this group a high-performance team:

Deciding the Goal: A goal is basically the objective of the formation of the team. What is the organisational objective that needs to be achieved with the help of the newly formed team. If the goal of the team is not clearly defined, the team is bound to fail in the project. A well defined and appropriately structured goal is the one that clearly communicates to each of the team member the project problem that needs to be addressed with the efforts of the team members. In an organisation, a team that is working on a new mobile app for a client would have members from technology, marketing, product, finance and human resource departments and all of them would have a clear understanding of what the team wants to achieve by the end of the project. Therefore, the first thing I would do is to define the goal of the project with the help of the team members and ensure that all the members of the team are on the same page with respect to the goal of the project.

Gathering Project Requirements: The requirements gathering stage is an important process in understanding the resources required to successfully attain the project objectives. The project resources may include variables such as number of manpower, technological requirements, workspaces, systems, etc. While gathering the project requirements, I would also evaluate the skill-set, knowledge, experience and expertise of each of the team member and would raise the requirement of an additional human resource with a specific skill-set (in the absence of its availability) to the human resource managers and hiring managers of the organisation.

Identifying Project Deliverables: Knowing the objective of the project is of no use, if the team doesn’t know in what form does the objective needs to be delivered. The deliverable of a project may differ from organisation to organisation as per their expertise and core competency of their business. For a company that creates websites, the project deliverable would be a website for one of its client. For a company that designs creative posters and banners, the project deliverable would be to design posters for an upcoming project launch of the client company. Therefore, with the help of the team, I would understand the project deliverables. Then, we will divide the whole project (or project deliverables) into measurable chunks or small tasks. These tasks then will be assigned to each of the team members according to their knowledge, background, education, skill-set and prior exposure along with a deadline to accomplish the assigned tasks.

Assembling the modules: The work modules received from each of the team member would then be assembled / combined together before handing it over to the client. Only after successful assembling of the small modules can the project deliverables be formed. Individual modules are of use only when they are integrated together to form a single component that provides solution to the client’s or organisational problems.

By following the aforementioned methodology, I believe the team will be able to convert itself into a high-performance team and would achieve the project objectives well before the required time.