The Team You Need is The Team Indeed
It it proved that to build a successful team is to assemble a group with various mix of knowledge and expertise. We need to get to know the strengths and personalities of each team member to build an effective team dynamics. What is team dynamics? Psychologically, team dynamics are the forces that navigate your team’s performance and behavior. This depends on the team members’ personalities to build the way each member of the team interact.
Good team dynamics could lead to a successful team with positive and effective output of works. Meanwhile, poor team dynamics could lead into poor decision-making, and it could make the team more vulnerable to conflicts, etc.
Here’s what you need to know about how to build a better team dynamics for your team:
1. Be an Effective Leader
If you’re a manager in a division, you need to be an effective manager and an effective leader. An effective leader gets to know team members well enough in order to pair them successfully in a project. You can get to know oneself by asking their previous supervisor/colleagues to get some insights into their habits, work ethics, and personality treats. Or just simply build a good communication with your team member. Be friendly to them, make them feel comfortable, and they’ll open up. Another quick way into this is to conduct a background and interest survey about each of your team members.
Then once the team is created, you can also conduct a team-building session to build team dynamics. Team building could be a session where the team member needs to show their true self. This session can change one’s perspective toward another. Like maybe when somebody sees your face, they think you’re an unfriendly person, so they might’ve been hesitant to talk to you. But once they talk to you for example in a team building session, they’d see that there’s nothing scary about you! Haha.
Team building could be done in lots of ways! The most common way, that I’ve experienced thru my college life is to have fun together, like play games together, karaoke, watch movies together, etc. Just to bond the team and build the sense of belonging of one another.
2. Be a Servant Leader
There’s no place for a bossy leader anymore. The old leadership style which focus on the thriving of their company or organization only is very out of style! If you want your team and company to grow, you need to learn to be a servant leader. What is it? Well, a servant leader is a leader whom besides focusing on their company’s thriving, also focuses on the needs of their team members and help them grow and perform as highly as possible.
According to Robert Greenleaf (2007), the focus should be “Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?”. When leaders change their leadership style to this, they benefit as well as their team members so they can acquire personal growth, meanwhile at the same time the organization grows as well due to the team members’ growing commitment and engagement to their work.
3. Acknowledge the Team’s Capacity
In a team like an Agile software development team that is working in sprints, before starting a new sprint, they will conduct meetings, one of them is Sprint Planning meeting. In sprint planning, the team members are being shown what Product Backlog Items (PBIs)they need to finish for the next sprint. Then, lead by the scrum master, each of the team member are being asked to give each PBI a story point to identify the team’s velocity and ability of working on those PBIs in a 2 weeks sprint. You can use websites like scrumpoker-online.org for that.
The board is like above. In my team, we usually choose the point 0.5–13. The accepted story point for a sprint is usually 8 or below. If the majority of members choose a point 13, the team needs to re-consider that and hold a discussion to find a way for the problem, because we are not only working on the project, but we’re also college students who have a bunch of other assignments. Usually if this issue comes up, reducing the PBI, or assigning tasks equally (if someone is complete with their works, they need to help others who haven’t finished theirs) could be a solution.
4. Hold a Routine Meeting & Address Issues Early On
“It’s important to address as many of the issues that arise together as a team, rather than singling people out” — Ashira Prossack
In an agile software development team, a daily stand up meeting is usually being held. This could also build team dynamics because everyone in the team would know about each other’s progress, plan, and blockers. It is good because if there’s a certain issue anyone is facing, as a leader, we can hear it addressed and help the team member to find a way to resolve this. Besides that, in a standup meeting, when the issue is addressed, there is a chance that one of the other team members knows the solution, thus, they can help each other out in resolving that. People in the team should also not be judgmental of another’s struggle in completing a task. Instead, as a leader we need to make sure that everyone could help each other out and if there is something to criticize about, it definitely needs to be given a constructive critics in a motivating way.
I think that’s all from me about the tips of building team dynamics. Whether you are the leader or team member, everyone in the team needs to work together to build a great team dynamics. Thank you for reading, and hope you’d have a wonderful day!
References:
Understanding the Importance of Team Dynamics (notredameonline.com)
The Difference Between Teamwork and Team Building (vantagecircle.com)
