How to manage a team effectively in business

Premakumar Fernando

TEAMWORK: A work place where employees want to be will be far more productive than one where they literally force themselves to come to work. Happiness is one of the most powerful and fundamental of the elements necessary to attract and keep the right people.

Employees who are happy in their jobs will work hard and well- and will be reluctant to leave. This article deals with how to manage a team effectively for them to be happy and to be productive.

If computer hardware gets better and cheaper every month, if software upgrades come too often to keep up, if one day your customers are in USA and the next day they're in Japan, what's constant in our business life? The answer is human capital.

To take full advantage of that capital, one must manage and invest in human capital. Normally we think of assets as just equipment, cash, or real estate. In our country we do not consider our human capital as the most valuable asset and it is often neglected resulting in Trade Union actions with millions of losses to the State as what we experienced with the go slow at Porta Authority. Just as you would upgrade equipment, office building, you must ensure that human assets have opportunities to upgrade old skills and develop new ones.

You must protect, honour and value the human investment; in order to do that you must know who's at work in your organisation.

Given the cost of hiring new employees, and the destabilising effect of a higher turnover of staff, you can't afford not to make your organisation a happy place to be. You need to look critically at the physical, social, and achievement environments to ensure that the mix of those three promotes a place where employees want to be.

Hayleys in its Annual Report states-"The group as a whole spends considerable sums of money on training and welfare". They have commissioned a programme to train 50 senior employees on their current and potential future role in the group.

Successful companies have greatly expanded their use of teams to attrack a wide variety of objectives: new product development, process reengineering, revitalising business units in decline etc; Teams can do wonders, but they can also be impediments to real progress if they are not properly designed, staffed and operated.

The team leader's task is to affirm the positive, reinforce individuals' and groups' accomplishments and share their successes. Keep employees focused on achievements and discourage dwelling on what could have been or what they don't have. We Sri Lankans generally do the reverse.

We harp always on what they not achieved and we rarely join in success sharing. Napoleon's description of leaders as 'dealers in hope' seems appropriate for us Sri Lankans.

If you are a new manager or a seasoned one with little experience in team-based work, being part of a team can throw you off stride. If you are a true team leader, you'll quickly discover that you cannot act like you are the boss. This is exactly what is happening with our public sector institutions.

As soon as a Government changes new leaders are appointed and they want to become bosses forgetting the role of being a team leader. The result is a de-motivated work force and a collapsed institution.

People who enjoy their work will do their job more positive and constructively than people who are unhappy or frustrated in their jobs. The team leader and his attitude help set the tone. Employees are happier in a workplace run by managers who enjoy themselves, their work, and their employees. (The opposite also applies).

Isn't this the reason why private sector establishments are more successful than the public sector enterprises in Sri Lanka? The private sector entrepreneurs enjoy themselves as they own the establishments.

A team in business sense is a number of individuals with complementary skills committed to a common purpose with collective accountability. In Sri Lankan set up we lack this attribute of collective accountability. When something good happens the leader takes full credit and if some disaster happens the buck is passed to the subordinates.

What are the characteristics of effective teams?

Management scholars and consultants have studied teams and team based performance fairly intensely for the past number of years and as a result there is a great deal of consensus on the characteristics of effective teams. Any successful team must have following characteristics:

Competence: We are all familiar with the expression, "A chain is only as strong as its weak link". This certainly applies to teams. An effective team is composed of people who each bring critical competencies to the effort.

Each is a link in chain of competencies that, together, has the talent, knowledge, organisational clout, experience and technical know-how to get the job done. Some institutions make the mistake of basing team membership on formal titles or in organizational position.

In many public sector enterprises various teams are appointed without a clear idea of its purpose. Different people have different ideas about their ultimate objective. This is the true state in many boards and corporations where the Chairman perceives one line of thinking and the Vice Chairman perceives another line of thinking. It is almost impossible to work in that kind of environment when other team members cannot articulate a clear and a common goal.

Commitment to the Common Goal: A shared understanding of the goal is extremely important, but really effective teams go a step further. They are composed of members who are committed to the goal.

In Private Sector the leaders are committed to achieve their targets and this is very much lacking in the public sector. The essence of a team is a shared commitment to goal achievement. That means that each team member must see the goal as very important and worthy of effort.

Performance depends on every one contributing. Individuals who only show up at meetings to render their opinions but do not work drag down performance and demoralise more active team mates. The board meetings of Public Sector Enterprises are a classic example of this.

The board members gather for the meeting to render their opinions and often demoralize the doers of the institution. "Free Riders" cannot be tolerated. And just as each member must contribute to the team's work, each should receive clear benefits.

A supportive environment: No team operates in a vacuum. A team is a small organisation embedded within a larger environment of operating units and functional departments. It depends on these organisational kin to one degree or another for resources, information and assistance.

Traditional managers play many roles: decision maker, director, and a scheduler of others' work. As a Team leader one must act more like a coach. You must empower others to solve problems and create plans. Let me conclude this article by making following suggestions for you to be an effective team leader.

Be an initiator. Begin actions and process that promote team development and performance.

Be a model to others. Use your own behaviour to set expectations from the team. Be a good coach. Act as a counselor, mentor, and tutor to help team members improve performance.

Be a mediator of conflict between team members.