Empowering Your Teams

It is a fact that leaders play a very important role in making great organizations. Mr Sridharan is considered as one of the greatest Indian leader in the field of management of great infrastructure projects. Konkan Railways and Delhi Metro are two examples that are quoted everywhere as the gift by Mr Sridharan to our country. But let us not forget that no organization can move ahead without energized, enthused and empowered employees. Many times it happens that despite having the best of the individuals in the organizations, they fail to achieve greater heights. This happens due to the lack of team effort and team bonding.

Good individuals are important for any organization. But the outcome from the combined effort of the team results in a level of performance that is greater than the input of each individual. So organizations achieve greater heights by creating workgroups/teams of individuals with diverse capabilities. These broad-based cross-functional teams consisting of members from different departments can be given various time bound projects from time to time. In such cases, Project Managers ensure that the skills of group members complement each other. These teams with specialists of different disciplines give rise to innovative ideas and creativity in the organizations.

The word team can be defined as follows:

• "A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable."

In simple words, the word Team means ‘Together Each one Achieves More’. This explanation itself tells a lot about the importance of Team Building and Empowering your Teams.

There are a few factors that are responsible for the success of any team. The first and foremost is the Effective Leadership. We have seen the excellent performance of Indian Cricket Team under the effective leadership of Dhoni. Some exceptions will always be there and if one goes into a bit of details about the Indian Cricket team when they performed miserably under the same captain, there were some reasons.

Every team will have a goal to achieve and should have a strategy to reach that target. Having decided the goal and strategy, three things are very important in order to succeed as a team: Clears Roles and Responsibilities of all team members, Open Communication within the teammates and a great speed of execution in modern times. Based on the roles and responsibilities of the team members, it is the duty of the leader to ensure that all members excel in their area and for that proper training and practice opportunities are provided to them.

All team members in a team should be self starters. They should own the overall goal of the team and specifically their part of the project. This happens when all team members feel that that they have been empowered to play their role with full freedom and responsibility. This happens only when the teams have achieved a certain level of maturity. When the new teams come into existence they pass through various stages of team formation.

They are:

1. Forming
2. Storming
3. Norming and
4. Performing

And the last stage can be called Adjourning when the team goal has been achieved. In the Forming stage, the role of the leader is a directing type, where he just gives precise instructions to the team members based on their skills and competency. In the storming stage, team members at times collide with each other when they perceive a threat to their own position in the team, may be based on some unfounded fears. During this phase, the leader has to behave like a coach and should try to sort out the differences between the team members. Next stage is the norming stage where the leadership is supposed to play a supporting role. By this time, it is expected that the team members know each other very well. They would have normalized their mutual problems and differences. They start accepting others despite some differences that still exist and even the minor idiosyncrasies of team members. The last stage of a team formation is the performing stage where team starts producing results. By this time the team is considered to have achieved maturity and is empowered and therefore the leader is expected to get into the delegation mode and focus on more important things in the organization.

Being a good teammate doesn’t mean that one has to be a ‘Yes man’. One should have the courage to differ but also the humility to accept the others’ view with an open mind. Your opinion should be totally devoid of selflessness and focused on the good of the team and the organization. Once a final decision has been taken by the leadership after a discussion or brain storming session, just go ahead with final decision in toto even if your personal views were different. Here we do assume that the team leader has no vested interest and is working in the interest of the organization.

The last point that I would like to mention is that a leader should try to create a culture of appreciation in his organization. Whenever, a leader has to praise his men, he should do so in public and if there is a requirement of reprimanding someone, it should be done in private, within the confines of the four walls of the cabin of the boss and never in front of the juniors and colleagues of the employee who is being admonished. We must realize the importance of establishing a strong and mutually beneficial bond between the manager / leader and the team and this will lead to PDC (Performance Driven Culture) in the organization through empowered employees.