Ever since my first job in retail, at the age of 16, I’ve been running or developing teams in some way, shape or form. While. in those earlier years, I wasn’t in charge of recruitment or training, those are key parts of making a team that actually works together, and a team that works well. It took me far too long to learn that your team is an extension of your skills, and that delegating, building specialists and getting people in who work differently than you, can make a team greater than the sum of its parts. This article is about the four things that I think are essential to building and developing a great team, things that have taken me years to learn and that I wish I knew earlier.
It’s hard being in charge of a team, but it’s also hard to be part of a team that doesn’t function. There’s as much as an obligation from the people who form, train and run the team to do so well as there is on the team members to work. That degree of give and take, alongside things like clear communications and knowing your teammates’ strengths and weaknesses are what make a great team. When you think of great teams in sports, film, TV or real life, that awareness of each other’s strengths is always what allows the team overall (and as such the team members) to thrive.
Now, I’m not writing today to give a big lecture on leadership, there’s plenty of other resources out there which can give great mentorship in those areas; And, I’m not here to give tips on recruiting, mentoring employees or building workplace culture either… I’m here to discuss the four key things you need to know about building a team. These are five things that I wish I knew when I started out.
Delegation
Much like many younger workers when they’re put in charge of a team, I had completely convinced myself that I’d earned the responsibility because I was the best at doing all of the tasks I was involved in. I was the best at unloading the trucks, I had the best memory for locations in the warehouse, I could build a flat-truck for an aisle in half the time of anybody else. I felt like I’d been given workers because they weren’t as good as me, and maybe I was expected to bring them up to my standard. But, the truth of the matter was that it was simply my eagerness to lead and the fact that I kept throwing myself into things 100% and trying to take responsibility. Getting that role was really just blind luck and I ended up overworking myself to try and meet my own expectation.
All my managers really wanted was somebody to supervise and co-ordinate the workers so that people weren’t wasting time lost between tasks, and that multiple people weren’t trying to do the same work. They’d delegated to me, asked me to manage certain tasks, and I’d not.
Delegation is critical in functional teams. It can be done and managed in different ways, from briefings and breaking down the workload, or through taking people who are naturally good at certain tasks and getting them to focus on those tasks for the majority of their worktime. Taking on all of the work is a terrible way to manage a team, and there are only a few times when you should be doing a task entirely on your own, and those are few and far between.
Specialists
Specialists and champions are the core of a team, and that works regardless of the size of a team. Even if your team is only two or three strong, you will still have people who are much better at customer service, searching for things online, or sorting through new information or stock. However, as that team gets bigger you’ll find that you have more and more people who can focus on smaller pieces of the overall task. Recognising, praising and supporting people who slot into these roles is critical, and it also lets you see where you might want to recruit people in future. Alternately, if you find you’ve just not got enough hands to cover the work, then – depending on the industry – you can bring in something like cobots or other tools which make certain tasks easier. When I run editorial teams I bring in editing structures, using digital folders to build a feedback loop; Tools and arrangements like this can bring the weaker members of the team up to a higher standard.
There are other, major things to consider though. 1) You do need to understand the tasks that you are assigning to people, if that means that you need to do that task with others, or on your own, for a while then you definitely should, and, 2) There are no such things as Jack of All Trades, but there are people with wide skills who work as great all-rounders. These people are, when they have the drive, your potential future leaders and should be treated as such.
Diversifying your team
Building on the role of the specialists in the team, every single member of the team brings something different to the table. It’s not just as simple as looking at people as a their experience in the roles. Over the years I’ve brought in lots of people from outside of the industry that they’re working in due to transferable skills, sometimes somebody who is an expert in one field can easily transfer to a different field but, also, those who struggle in one area can thrive in others. It’s not just a case of skills and experience though, background, gender, nationality are also important to mix up as well. If your team don’t know any different, how can they start working outside of the box and improving in new areas?
Always Listen
There’s no point in building a diverse team of people who each have valuable skills if you don’t listen to, and learn from, the team. In most cases your team are the window to the customers, or at the forefront of the industry. Listening to the people on the ground is the best way to make sure that you can tell trends ahead of time, or at least know which way to look when changes are coming. Not only is this a great way to learn about what’s coming up, but it’s the best way to show your team that you value them… and having an established degree of communication also allows them to let you know when something is out of line, or could cause issues further down the line. Diversity and different voices really help here, different industries, backgrounds and nationalities have different nuances to them and if you don’t take time to be aware of that then you risk becoming insensitive or worse.
Don’t view your team as extra arms, they’re also your eyes and ears.