Best Idea Ever for Building an Effective Team

The best idea ever for building a strong team is an idea almost as old as time; Effective Communication. However, human communication has changed over time from simple grunting and pointing around a campfire, to electronic messages that zip around the world at the speed of light.

As a leader and manager, you set the stage for the success or failure of your team. There is always work to be done, and teams can make themselves be busy, or even just look busy, without anyone telling them what to do. Similar to how an increase in salary is quickly allocated and absorbed into a household budget, so does an increase in time available at work. To make sure all your work teams are using their time to the best of their ability, it is important to keep everyone on track, and working towards the established goals.

Imagine you are the coxswain (leader) of a sport rowing team, and each of your employees is one of the rowers. If they all start rowing in different directions, or at different times, there is going to be a lot of energy put forth, but not much progress towards a single goal. As the leader, you are tasked with making the necessary decisions that get everyone working within the same rhythm, and moving in the same direction to win.

Much like the coxswain, you have a different perspective of the rest of the team. You are the only one who can see where they are headed, and you need to make the right calls to keep them moving forward. This requires constant communication of where the team is, where they are headed, and how you plan to get them there. But unlike the coxswain, your entire team isn’t always sitting right in front of you within earshot of what you have to say. This is where the use of the Balanced Scorecard can come into play.

A great balanced scorecard is able to share the entire team’s goals, and the portions of those goals made up by the various groups, or even the contributions of individual team members. This tool could help give you the competitive edge you need to outperform your competition, and get a leg up in the ever-expanding global marketplace. It communicates goals, strategy, and shows team performance so that managers can make effective decisions and focus their time where it is needed most (Lawson, et al, 2008).

The best part, is that the balanced scorecard isn’t just for managers and leaders. It can communicate this same information to everyone within an organization. Once the culture and daily business of using a scorecard system is in place, it will be second nature for employees to check on their team’s results throughout the day, week, or month to see how they shape up. In doing so, employees become not just a tool towards solving a problem or completing a goal, they become managers of their own daily duties, and they are able to stay on track towards what is expected of them.

The balanced scorecard has many secondary uses as well. Managers can use it as an evaluation tool for their team members. With specific goals communicated on a regular basis, employees will understand how they are being evaluated. It can also be used to create a cause and effect map of how teams are operating, and can be used to measure progress and ability over time. By keeping data long-term, you gain the ability to measure the same areas day over day, month over month, and year over year in order to map trends in the market. This same information can be used to calculate relationships between different measures that can help plot potential future success or failure when certain conditions are met, similar to profitability, liquidity, and valuation ratios in finance (Lawson, et al, 2008).

Additionally, with everyone always up to date on target goals and the progress towards them, teams are able to collaborate on results and support each other more effectively. This means stronger synergy between departments that are able to change how they work, or pitch in when other teams are struggling to meet their goals (Lawson, et al, 2008).

In the end, everyone needs to be working towards the same point on the horizon, and with strong leadership offering open channels of communication to guide them, they are able to work more effectively as individuals, and more importantly, as a team.

References

Lawson, R., Hatch, T., & Desroches, D.. (2008). Scorecard best practices: design, implementation, and evaluation. [Books24x7 version] Available from http://common.books24x7.com/toc.aspx?bookid=23364.