It is a no brainer that when people work together as a team better decisions are made than if the individual team members were working alone. Two heads are better than one, as they say. Yesterday’s manager could have been an expert in all areas of his or her field and may have been able to tell direct reports exactly what to do to complete a task. With today’s fast paced world and technology, managers do not necessarily know all the detail. In fact, good managers will have people working under them that do the job better than they do. It follows that the real skill that a manager needs is to be able to have good teambuilding skills to guide, drive and inspire his or her team to success.

Building Team Spirit

In order to build team spirit, the following five factors are essential.

1. Open Communication – Being able to have open, honest communication is very important for creating successful teams. Next time you observe a team strongly disagreeing with one another as to the best way to improve a product or service, take a moment to realise that this is actually a great team at work. One that is passionate about achieving the best outcome.
2. Empowerment – When you empower team members to make the final decisions with regards to the work they are doing, they become more confident in their abilities and will take greater pride in their work. Be careful to ensure that the team is ready for empowerment though. If not, it could spell disaster.
3. Clear Roles & Responsibilities – As a manager you need to make sure that each team member’s roles and responsibilities are clearly defined. They need to know what is expected of them and each other. This prevents overlapping of work and handballing responsibilities, which often leads to one person doing more work than another to pick up the slack.
4. Effective Leadership – You need to set clear goals for each team member, give continual feedback emphasising the positive more than the negative, share examples of your personal mistakes to relate to the team and encourage team members to share their views and opinions where there is a conflict.
5. Reward & Accountability System – It is very important that people are held accountable for their responsibilities within a team. By the same token, people need to be rewarded for their individual as well as their team contributions. It’s not about trying to single one person out or rewarding one person more than the others. Take a look at the most successful sports teams where members earn more based on the position or their achievements.

(Not sure how to start communicating openly with your team? Try using an icebreaker.)