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What are some team building and team leadership tips that a manager can use to successfully and efficiently lead a team of sales executives?

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Question added by Ola Qtaishat , Training Officer , Bank Of Jordan
Date Posted: 2016/03/10
Sidrah Nadeem
by Sidrah Nadeem , Global Marketing Manager , Hill+Knowlton Strategies

  1. Be a really good listener, make sure you include everyone's input before formulating a strategy.
  2. Make everyone aware of their strengths by the quality of discussions you promote.
  3. KPI's should always be set based on past performance + the aptitude to take up challenges.
  4. Sales executives should be trained 
  5. Lunch/ coffe breaks or some sort of out of office activities should be planned so that the team knows each other and forms a connection.
  6. Team unity and empathy needs to be inculcated.

ghazi Almahadeen
by ghazi Almahadeen , Project Facilitator , Jordan River Foundation

 : Muhammad Awwal Jibril Support the answer   

Well so I can lead the team managers Atiiven successfully and efficiently either by social relations "exchanging experiences" that would affect positively on the work or by linking the goals the team does not mean an individual but a collective success

Muhammad Awwal Jibril

Muhammad Awwal Jibril Volunteer at APC- Associacao Projeto Cidadao

تتبّع

 

Jamela Jones Samidan
by Jamela Jones Samidan , GENERAL MANAGER , TRIO UNO FOOD KIOSK

For me, firstly, it is important to know each other ( members of the team ). Background,culture,anything that we can know about each other. It is very important because we need to build our team's foundation which can be a friendship or co-worker relationship, it depends. After that, we can move one step forward. Because, we were able to gain each other's trust . And for that, we can be assure that whatever the team will face in the future, they will always be a team that have each other's back and that's what's important to me,knowing that my team will not be just my team by work, but also my family and friend.

Muhammad Awwal Jibril
by Muhammad Awwal Jibril , English Language Teacher , Poliglota

A good feedback mechanism that helps team members to resolve challenges they encounter, Training and retraining of team members can also build their understanding in achieving their goals, Creating an avenue for positive competition, rewarding outstanding team members and rendering technical support when needed.

Gayasuddin Mohammed
by Gayasuddin Mohammed , Advocate , Practicing Law before High Court at Hyderabad

Agreed and have the same view of Mr.Zain-ul-abddin. thanks

KUMARESAN MURUGESAN
by KUMARESAN MURUGESAN , Advanced Database Administrator , Walmart Global Technology Pvt Ltd

1) understand individual strength and weakness.

2) Motivation and acknowledgement of each task.

3) Success if any to be credited on credited on individual and if any failure has to be accepted as a team.

4) Effective communication

5) Deploying of task to the correct individual.

ACHMAD SURJANI
by ACHMAD SURJANI , General Manager Operations , Sinar Jaya Group Ltd

Top 10 Leadership Tips for High Performance Team Building

 

If as the leader of your organization you're unable to build and sustain basic teamwork, your team-based competitors are going to replace you in the market. It’s just a matter of time.

 

 

 

Teamwork failure is actually one of the quickest, most costly and common sources of business failure in tech startups.

 

Team dysfunction is also one of the most mismanaged and poorly understood blockers of competitive advantage leading to fiscal decline in established companies. It’s an incredible source of needless, toxic stress and the complete opposite of employee wellbeing.

 

Related Post: 5 Work Life Balance Hacks Millennials will Love! 

 

 Don't worry; you can breathe a sigh of relief.

 

It turns out that learning how to build and run a truly high performance team in most business settings is actually pretty simple and straightforward. Teamwork is based on a set of surprisingly easy to learn skills that are arguably as or even more important than the skills that make up most formal job descriptions.  

 

What You really need to know about Team Building is  that 90% of team building interventions, like most change management initiatives, fail to get any results; but there are 2 simple reasons for that and I have the solution for you:

 

  • They fail to actually teach evidence-based teamwork skills. For example, you can’t learn how to turn team conflict into your most valuable source of innovation and engagement from a drum circle or obstacle course. That’s corporate entertainment not team building.

 

  • And most importantly, even when quality teamwork skills are taught, there’s too often a critical failure to move those new teamwork skills from the training experience into the real work environment.

 

 

 

 So what’s the fastest and most cost effective way to actually build high performance teamwork into your company culture?   

 

 Well, if you want a 5 to 10X (minimum ROI) return on investment for your team building dollars, you need to hire an experienced team building expert and coach who will both teach you the most important team leadership skills and connect with you intensively once every week or 2 for a 30-60 minute intensive coaching session as you learn to build and nurture your own team in real time!

 

This idea that high level leadership coaching needs to have a 5-10X ROI comes from the world's leading  trainer of business focused executive coaches: Andrew Neitlich

 

Working with a team building coach is especially critical if there’s been any conflict avoidance or team dysfunction up until now. Most leaders need a trusted advisor as they correct existing levels of team dysfunction.

 

 

 

 So what are the top 10 most important team building skills you need to know and start implementing as a leader?

 

Most of the business leaders and managers I've worked with have drawn a blank when I've asked them for a clear, actionable definition of highly effective business teamwork.

 

Some have had pretty good definitions but were unable to clearly describe the specific new ways of thinking or the, specific, high-value teamwork behaviors that needed to be developed in  their teams.

 

It's really surprising how few managers and supervisors out there really know how to effectively manage team conflict.

 

Let me start by sharing a very clear and helpful definition of teamwork followed by a breakdown of the top ten team leadership skills you need to start implementing aspa.

 

My Definition of  a High-Performance Team:

 

2 or more people working task interdependently towards  common performance goals as enabled by a strong and specific set of positive team culture behaviors. 

 

 

 

What does “task interdependently” mean?

 

That’s a very important question! In fact some organizations don't need to build teams as much as they need to practice deep engagement leadership and behavior based performance management.

 

Take sports teams as an example.

 

In golf and tennis you don’t need teamwork. It’s one person working or playing independently. In hockey or football on the other hand, one person can’t play alone and teamwork is critical to winning the game. Is the kind of work you do in your organization or department truly task interdependent? If so:

 

 

 

Not only do most employees thrive in team based settings but real teamwork is the fastest, most effective and most profitable way to get work done – period.

 

Teamwork is hands down the single most powerful tool for creating high levels of active employee engagement and discretionary effort. It’s also the key to effective and sustained organizational change.

 

 

 

Here’s what you need to start doing if you want to really build your team: 

 

  1. Continuous Goal Clarification: The single most important and defining attribute of a high performing team is a mutual commitment by all team members to accomplishing serious performance goals. This is often done through the setting up of “SMART Goals”.  Team members need actionable goals that are clearly defined, - goals that are easily measurable in terms of time to completion and the specific action steps and strategies required to bridge the gap between the current state and the goal attainment state. Effective team leaders are constantly in tune with often rapidly changing internal and external customer needs. This keeps them in continuous goal clarification mode, making sure that team goals are aligned with business strategy and that everybody knows what everybody’s supposed to be doing. 2. Continuous Role Clarification: Effective team leaders are master role clarifiers, constantly working to insure that each employee’s formal work role is optimally crafted to meet or exceed the team’s performance goals. This means making sure that the team’s strategy and task structure is always the shortest path to the team’s success.    One of the biggest sources of highly toxic and stressful team dysfunction is a lack of role clarification on the part of individual members.  When team members are not clear about what they each need to be doing or what others' need to be doing especially in blended roles, role-assumptions and conflicts will arise that are counter-productive to what each person is actually supposed to be doing.  

 

The natural tendency is to avoid conflict because most people simply don’t know how to manage it. And that leads to stonewalling, arguments, active disengagement and dangerous misalignment from your most important business goals and company values.

 

Team dysfunction is a dark force that thrives on sapping the highest levels of team learning, bonding, innovation, passion and creativity.  The higher the potential as team the deeper their potential is for team conflict. Teams who are on the verge of generating huge value for each other and their customers are particularly susceptible. Startups who experience fast early growth too often fall  victim to team dysfunction and underperformance.   3. Build a Solid Team Performance Culture:

 

High performance teamwork is virtually impossible without a team sustaining culture.   The most effective team leaders create and nurture their teams through consistently displaying behaviors that model their core values like a genuine concern for employee-wellbeing, collaborative learning, effective communication, and full managerial transparency. They know that real time objective information flow is the lifeblood of team performance.  High performance team leaders reinforce healthy team behavior cultures by working with their teams to co-create a team vision statement made up of the team’s own core values to guide and inform team member interactions.  This is sometimes done based on a facilitated exploration of a company’s value statement. Even highly dysfunctional and disengaged employees will start to buy in when they see you walking the right kind of talk.  And yes there is no "I" in Team – literally!   When the most effective team leaders talk, they talk about shared goals and accomplishments; they talk about “our goals” and "what we've accomplished” and “our team” not “my goals” or “my accomplishments” or “my team”.  This is especially true when they speak to other leaders, people and customers outside of their teams.4. Effective Employee Recognition: High performance team leaders are also deeply skilled in the art and science of effective employee recognition. They're always in positive behavioral scan seeking to frequently catch their employees in the very act of high performance. They understand and implement The 3 R’s of Effective Employee Recognition: 

 

 

 

  Strong team leaders also know that effective employee recognition is the single most powerful way to shape and reinforce high value teamwork behaviors while significantly reducing turnover and absenteeism.

 

Effective team leaders balance strategically recognizing and rewarding individual role behaviors and accomplishments with strategically recognizing and rewarding team effectiveness behaviors and accomplishments.

 

They use genuine, heart felt recognition to help grow new teaming skills and high value work behaviors. They then apply recognition to keep those behaviors going and growing.  

 

Must Read: 36 Powerful Employee Recognition Ideas

 

5. Real Time Conflict Management: In order for a work group to become a real high performing team, effective conflict management is critical. Team leaders who are conflict avoidant are not team leaders; they're your average supervisor or manager; and that’s why only 10-20% of employees are actually engaged at work. It’s also the biggest reason organizations, old and new are hemorrhaging their top talent.

 

As roles, goals and strategy are continuously being defined and refined to keep in alignment with business strategy and rapidly evolving customer needs, group conflict is inevitable. This is where high performance teams can quickly regress into the storming phase of group development. Sadly many teams never recover. 

 

 Without a highly responsive conflict management process in place, grudges, egos and politics thrive. 

 

Effective team leaders on the other hand, instantly and transparently surface and address the root-cause issues and untested assumptions that are holding their teams back. They enable a deep sense of trust, where team members feel safe and inspired by common interests and the kind of mutual growth benefit and gain that only teams can generate. Back to the sports metaphor: They start to really see and feel that they can't win the hockey or football game alone.  

 

This enables them to seamlessly transform potential group conflict into major sources of trust, motivation and creativity for the team. In most cases the root causes boil down to a lack of one of the core teaming skills or communication processes I'm describing in these 10 team building tips. 

 

 

 

6. Continuous Leader-Follower Development and Team Maintenance:

 

In order for high performance teams to function, each member, not just the leader, needs to possess a core competency of teaming skills. Each employee needs to know how effective business teams work, how they meet, how they communicate.

 

Ultimately, the best team leaders are very careful to insure that each team member is constantly developing in their readiness to take on the team leadership role themselves as they grow with the organization.

 

7. Shared Leadership: The most effective high performance teams practice distributed leadership even if it’s informal. As the team moves through different phases of defining and realizing its performance goals, different areas of content expertise can come into strategic focus. This is particularly true of cross functional teams made of members from different departments and roles.

 

 

 

 

 

When one team member is a content expert for a particular project phase, that team member is ideally suited if she has the teaming skills, to guide and lead the team during that phase in which her formal role is the critical one. This is also true if one team member has discovered a value adding process or teachable workflow improvement that needs to be integrated into how the team gets things done.  Cutting edge tech firms actually invite their best customers to become members of their product and service innovation, customer experience, digital marketing and other strategic planning teams. You'll create the most win-win value working with these top customers and stakeholders, just like with your employees: by including them in the team development process.8. High Involvement Leadership: The most effective high performance team leaders know that strong internal commitment to the team’s goals on the part every team member is critical to their success.  Effective team leaders facilitate internal commitment on the part of all team members by actively and continuously eliciting team member participation in key decision making, quality improvement and goal setting processes.  The more team members participate in making important decisions, crafting performance goals and developing actionable strategies for meeting those goals, the greater their sense of shared and personal goal ownership becomes. The greater the team’s shared sense of personal and shared goal-ownership, the greater their internal commitment and motivation to meet and exceeded those goals. This is the essence of active employee engagement. It leads to discretionary effort and extra-role behavior.

 

 

 

That sense of merely doing someone else’s job is replaced with a strong sense of meaningfully creating and meaningfully owning the team's work outputs together. 

 

Being able to effectively performance coach your team is the third biggest reason for working with a coach, second only to helping you iron out any existing team conflict in real time at the outset of the coaching relationship, and of course actually succeeding as a high performance team leader instead of wasting money on training on entertainment.

 

9. Collaborative Action Learning and Listening (CALL): The 9th habit of highly effective team leaders is to enable continuous team learning and improvement through an iterative team learning cycle that I call "collaborative action learning and Listening" or “CALL”.

 

As the heart of team performance coaching, effective CALL implementation involves a feedback cycle of setting (usually short term or sub project) goals, implementing strategies and then evaluating the effectiveness of those strategies in meeting those goals.

 

And of course, a core set of active listening skills is essential for your team's life blood - its communication. This means asking open ending questions and really putting yourself in your team members place so you can really hear where they're coming from and what they need from you. 

 

It means learning to clearly communicate feelings and frustrations related to your work , and stating needs without being hurtful of critical. That just causes shut downs or defensiveness and counter criticism.

 

It's fascinating how the same basic negative communication patterns that destroy teams are the same one's that are scientifically proven to predict marriage failure. Maybe that's why so many (especially North American) seniors business leaders and managers are actually married. 

 

 

 

Goals and action strategies are then revised and improved based on their practical outcomes and rapidly changing customer needs and market conditions in real time in monthly or bi weekly rapid team facilitation meetings.

 

On teams where roles where much of the work stays the same most of the time. The focus is more on performance coaching. 

 

Key CALL questions you need to be asking: 

 

  • Did this strategy lead to goal attainment in the most cost effective and timely manner possible? 

 

  • How can we improve this strategy or process to make it even more effective the next time it’s implemented? 

 

  • Are we providing optimal results to our internal or external customers and stakeholders? 

 

  •  Do our current overarching team performance goals continuously deliver on a superior and actionable value proposition within our niche or market? 

 

  • What specific work behaviors do we need to strengthen, start doing behaviors or stop doing to become more effective as a team? 

 

  • How are we performing overall, - are we functioning as a real team right now or just a work group; if so what needs to change and how do we change it? 

 

The added beauty of CALL is that it can also be used in the team maintenance and constructive conflict management processes, to quickly assess the team’s own performance and functioning as a team.

 

 

 

10. Team Leader as Gatekeeper: The last but definitely not the least of the 10 habits of highly effective team leaders is his or her critical role as team gatekeeper.

 

From an organizational science perspective high performance teams, like the top organizations they thrive in, can be viewed as complex adaptive systems in their own right. Teams need critical resources to survive and grow. They also need to be protected from toxic inputs. 

 

Team-critical resources include everything from having a sufficient budgets and state of the art technology to having just-in-time training and development opportunities to keep team member knowledge, skills and abilities at a high enough level to consistently outperform the competition or bring their own performance as a team to the next level.

 

Extraordinary team leaders have also mastered the art of protecting the team from harmful inputs from the surrounding organization or environment. They know how to buffer and protect their teams from toxic organizational politics, poor information flow and of course, role-overload.

مها شرف
by مها شرف , معلمة لغة عربية , وزارة التربية السورية

I agree with experts answers,thanks for the invitation.......

Yahia mohamed  Amen Gad
by Yahia mohamed Amen Gad , إدارة - مدرب - , سنابل الأجيال للتعليم والتدريب

Thank you for the invitation and I agree with colleagues

Wasi Rahman Sheikh
by Wasi Rahman Sheikh , WAREHOUSE SUPERVISOR , AL MUTLAQ FURNITURE MFG

Agree with experts answer <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Zain ul Abdin
by Zain ul Abdin , Project Planning & Control Manager , Redco International Trading and Contracting

  • Know the capabilities of team members
  • Deploy them (assign them) to areas that match their capabilities
  • Give them target to achieve that are 110% of their assessed capabilities
  • Monitor their performance and provide guideline wherever necessary
  • Be fair and transparent in the judgement of their performance and apprise them accordingly.

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