To really understand how to build a team is probably one of the most crucial abilities of a manager who not only want to but also can create winning and profitable businesses, time after time.
“Team-building” is NOT something you do two days every other year at some “positive consulting company” that takes us out on some interesting and exciting survival exercise. Perhaps a fun experience yes, and such an exercise could possibly work, primarily as a reward for the teams that have already proven that they are and work as a team. But for those groups who have not already managed to operate as a team, doing these “exciting exercises” you risk to even worsen the situation when one rather tend to reward the group because it is not functioning.
Team building is a definitive and essential activity in any successful business and should be done within its own walls and the main job should be carried out by our own staff five days a week, all weeks of the year. The factors that help to build and develop teams should simply be natural and preferably quite deliberately built into the company’s operations and structure.
Performia is an international company focused since its inception 15 years ago to get their clients to grow by helping business leaders to gain the knowledge and the tools that are often lacking, and at the same time needed to get the name “team” (for their own staff) to go from being an undefined or vaguely understood concept into a working reality that can be built with full awareness.
So, we at Performia are not here to build your team. We already know that is one of your and your colleagues’ actual core tasks. However, we are here to support you and your colleagues with the knowledge and systems which can greatly facilitate and enable your internal team building or team development, no matter how real or unreal it may seem right now. If you really want to succeed or possibly succeed better than you do today as manager for your staff, we can usually help you to quickly get to a point where you can control and execute most of this job yourself with the help of your team and the systems we can provide. We are definitely not intending to be your consultant forever or become an eternal trainer. Once you and your team get it you can do it.
Performia program for Team Building includes:
Focus on individual productivity.
No employee feels truly good if he or she is not contributing to the group’s survival and prosperity. Here there is much to learn but at the same time, there are very simple steps that can generate major improvements. When one of your employees begins to produce better, both the individual and the team moves immediately in the right direction.
Knowledge of how to recruit the right person.
Recruitment is obviously a key area in the creation of an operational team and that means that even the most senior managers of any company need to have a thorough understanding of how this actually should and could be done in reality. We often think of “recruitment” as only “the hiring of new employees”. And yes, this area is incredibly important, and if you really understand this area as thoroughly as we recommend, you can as well more effectively help “recruit” the right suppliers, the right customers, the right distributors, the right partners, the right board members, etc. Basically, the level of your business survival rises or falls on the ability to accurately assess different people.
Most companies are losing enormous amounts of money and as well a huge amount of time due to key personnel in management, which often are very knowledgeable in many different areas, have not yet received sufficient knowledge to be able to recruit the right person everywhere. Real potential companies can thus remain only “potential”, or just partly reach its potential, or at worst be closed down instead of having a great success as a team.
Look at Steve Jobs who took Apple from the brink of bankruptcy in 1997 to what Apple is today, the most profitable company on the planet in less than 12 years. What most people don’t know is how involved Mr. Jobs was in the recruitment process. He personally interviewed over 5000 job applicants for Apple as he did understand the importance of this area.
The difference in the end result can thus be huge while the actual work (in number of hours) by management often gets less when you succeed in the art of creating a team. We have many of our customers who have thanked us for now being able to take a normal vacation without having to worry that the company will nor function or be managed while they are gone.
Development of existing staff.
Existing staff who are already doing well plus many of those who are not functioning optimally can often (if the willingness is there) quite easily be remedied or improved further. However, it is incredibly important how you proceed when you commence that process. If you do it wrong it can turn into a strenuous, inefficient and expensive activity and if you do it right it quickly can become a profitable, a real competitive advantage and something that contributes to the team becoming more a team and thus also more productive.
Job satisfaction and profitability.
Productive teams are not only considerably more viable, but also normally a lot more pleasant to work as part of (providing that you yourself are reasonably productive). This is often a not unimportant part of the “payment” for those executives who are looking at and wanting to become an expert also in the area of team building.
I hope this has been helpful and feel welcome to contact me if you are interested in learning more about Performia’s services to educate and support you and your group members to become more effective as Team Builders.