The Best Tips for a Successful Team

There are many tips that can be followed in order to have a successful team, some of these tips I have already posted below. I shared a link at the bottom of this post explaining the top ten characteristics of effective teams. If you have any more characteristics that I have not yet touched upon or are not on the link provided, please do tell!!

http://www.excellerate.co.nz/tt10characteristics.html

Follow the Leader

One key thing to have on your team is to have an effective leader. You need a good leader to be able to delegate what should be done and when it should be completed by. Although sometimes more than one person will want to be the team leader, in that case you can have a co-leader. Majority of the time though people do not want the responsibility of being the one to delegate because they may feel that it will be more work for them. Has anyone of you been a team leader? If so how did it go over and was your task completed successfully?

Team Ethics

Ethics is known as a system of moral principles. Now when you are doing a team, partner or group project having ethical members is better than not. Being able to trust your fellow team members is a recipe for success. You can’t have a untrustworthy person in your group because you do not know if that individual is going to turn around and leak your information to a competing group. Every person on your team has an ethical responsibility to do everything that is in the best interest of the group as a whole. Was anyone you know, yourself included, been in a group where one of the members has conducted unethical activities? If so, how?  

Two heads are better than one

It is commonly known that two heads are better than one. This phrase means that you will obtain better results if the ideas are coming from more than just one person. The ability to work with a partner or on a team is a huge characteristic of being successful. Although people do greatly enjoy self recognition, group recognition is also highly valued. Team members help to tell you what you are doing right and also they tell you what you can improve on or are doing wrong. It is key to be able to handle constructive criticism in order to succeed. Have you ever been in a situation where constructive criticism was too much for you to handle?

Communication station

Communication between team members is one of the most important aspects of becoming successful in today’s society. Although sometimes it may be hard to communicate between certain members in your group due to their poor language skills or their ethnicity, you will always have to find common ground in which to communicate. For example, earlier this year I had to switch one of my instructors for a class because he/she was an immigrant and I found it extremely difficult to understand what he/she was trying to convey. It was not the fact that he/she was a bad teacher or anything, I just did not get their analogies and was not able to break down what he/she was trying to express. I am sure that this is not the first time in which something like this has happened. So I was wondering if a similar situation has happened to any of you and if so please explain.

Fight for the cause

In any group, big or small, there will likely be some form of conflict. The key to success is not to avoid this conflict but to embrace it. There are two types of conflict when it come to teams the conflict that occurs when members are arguing over what ideas should be followed and the conflict when two people in the group just simply do not like each other and it had nothing to do with the task at hand. The ideal conflict is when people bicker over ideas because better ideas come from that and those types of conflicts are usually resolved fairly quick. When two people in the group do not like each other because of personal reason, this usually causes a tense and hostile environment for the remaining group members. If you have ever been in a group/team where you personally do not like another member of your group, and this has hampered your groups ability to finish the task, please feel free to explain the situation and how or if you overcame it.