How to build an effective team

Whether you’re an executive, a line manager or a senior team member with hiring and leadership influence, building and developing a truly excellent and effective team might be the most important thing you do. That’s because effective teams can accomplish more for a business than any one outstanding employee.

In my experience, a great team is not just a group of great people. It’s the right great people with the right skills and personality qualities aligned on the right objectives with the right leadership. When those elements line up, a leader can successfully position a team to excel and drive results.

Here’s how to do it with some team-building tips.

Building teams doesn’t just mean hiring people. You can transform a struggling group into an excellent one with strategic management (and without adding to headcount).

That takes:

• Attention to purpose
• Clear objectives
• Aligned values
• Skill development
• Proactive management
• Proper enablement

If you’re building a new team from scratch, of course, you’ll focus almost entirely on hiring.

In my own career, I’ve done a bit of each: building new teams at startups, reorganizing existing teams in turnaround companies and building out teams in scaling businesses. In each of these situations, a blend of external hiring and internal team building has been important, because even a brand-new crew requires immediate attention to culture and process to succeed.

Through proactive leadership and teamwide communication, you should always be assessing your team’s needs, strengths and opportunities for growth. Look for opportunities to either promote from within or hire talent from outside the company to keep your team progressing in its performance and abilities.

What exactly do we mean by “great team”? That depends on how you answer the following:

1. What objectives does your team need to achieve?
2. What knowledge and skills are needed to achieve them?
3. What individual qualities among team members will empower them to work well together and be productive?

These elements constitute both processes and profiles, which are equally important to a team-building strategy. As you consider each, also bear in mind the inherent strength of building a team that encompasses a diverse range of experience and perspectives. And while outcomes are important, so too are engagement and employee retention.

Processes include all the things your team does to achieve business results. The most important part of process development is defining your objectives. Too many leaders skip the step of defining measurable goals for a team and end up setting out to “hire rock stars.” Never mind that they have no concrete vision for what “rock star” actually means for their team.

This approach can lead to hiring, and then burning out, great people, without delivering meaningful results for the business.

In setting goals for building an effective team, consider both your overarching mission and measurable objectives that represent the achievement of that mission. For well-defined team types, such as sales teams, this can be as straightforward as achieving specific revenue goals on a quarterly and annual basis, perhaps with growth in performance over time.

For technical teams, it might mean shipping a product or feature and maintaining it over time to a certain standard of reliability or customer satisfaction.

The important thing is to articulate what the high-level mission is, preferably in a single sentence, and then identify the measurable indicators for achieving that mission.

With your team’s mission and measurable objectives defined, consider the workflows that will set up your team for success. What will the actual work of the team look like? How will projects be defined? How will work be managed and tracked? What skills will be needed? How will you measure quality? What does “done” look like? The answers will help you define processes for the team — and can also define how many people you need to hire, in which roles and with what skills.

A few years ago, I was leading a services organization for a cloud software company, and a key member of the implementation team left for another opportunity. Immediately, the manager of that group wanted to post a listing for the same role and skills as the engineer who had left. But on analysis, it seemed that our recently defined workflows would benefit more from an engineer with a slightly different skill set, and that happened to be a great fit for someone already in the company in a more junior role.

Rather than simply hire a drop-in replacement for the departing employee, we defined a new role and promoted from within, which turned out to be a great move more aligned to the direction we were taking the technology and the customer experience.

It also happened to be a great opportunity for the employee promoted, who went on to thrive in the organization.

Had we not already gone through the effort of defining our objectives and tailoring our processes to those objectives in the way I’ve described, we might have hired a great new person into an entirely wrong role.

By profiles I mean the types of roles and skills you’ll need to assemble for the work. It’s much easier to define profiles if you’ve already defined your processes (and know what work will be done at each stage of a workflow).

Beyond professional skills, you should also consider:

• The company culture
• The pace of work
• The interpersonal dynamics of the team
• The experience you want to provide to customers

These soft skills of a hiring profile are easy to overlook but can be major determinants of employee and team success over time. So, pay attention!

Once you know what you’re looking for in a new hire, it’s good practice to evaluate candidates with several members of your team.

I like to have three people on a hiring team, each responsible for evaluating a different aspect of the candidates’ skills and personalities.

One might interview for background experience, another for technical expertise and another for interpersonal skills. The exact composition of the interview subjects might vary from one role to another, but the basic approach has served me well for many years and helps to prevent mishires with serious deficits in important skills or qualities.

The hiring team should meet in advance of the process to align on what they’re looking for in each interview and share notes immediately after interviews to help eliminate bad fits and advance promising candidates quickly. 

It’s difficult to rely on the hiring process alone to ensure your team has the right skills. Why? Because every industry evolves, companies adapt to new technologies and standards, and individuals seek opportunities to learn new skills and advance in their careers.

A solid professional development program is essential to ensuring employees have opportunities to grow within the company. It can also help prepare them for advancement when positions open up internally.

In larger organizations, it can be practical to build out training and development programs in-house, while smaller to midsize organizations usually benefit from outsourcing those programs to learning providers and educational institutions. No matter where you find yourself on that spectrum, it’s important to check in regularly with team members at various levels of the organization to understand which skills are in demand and identify programs that fit those needs. 

Team building is never really done. The needs of the business continually evolve, and individuals who are part of effective teams do too. As a leader, you’ll need to check in frequently with people across your organization to assess how well the team is operating and to seek feedback.

Be sure to check in with new and junior team members too: Their perspectives can often be very different from those of management and valuable to understand and incorporate. After all, it’s often those doing the most entry-level work who have the best view of where things aren’t working well.

These communication touchpoints also present great opportunities to test for alignment with mission objectives by hearing how junior employees understand the mission and success criteria they’re measured against.

With an eye for the big picture and attention to detail in processes and people’s profiles, team building can make a tremendous difference in the success of your organization. It may also be the most fun and rewarding aspect of any leadership role.