Overcome Team Building Challenges To Handle Your Team Better

Teamwork is all about working together and watching out for each other’s back. Effective teamwork is not even teamwork unless everyone works together and there are enough challenges to win over. And when you, as a business owner or manager have a team to maintain and manage their work efficiently then the team-building challenges that you would face are enough to get one frustrated and worn out.

Once you get past the first step of getting a team of professionals with the right balance of skills and devotion ready then you move on to the challenges of building that team. Your next step would then be to zero in on the common challenges that you and your team need to address. After figuring out the key challenges that your team is facing, you would then need to find some of the practical ways of conquering each of them.

And so in today’s post, we will help you identify those major yet common challenges that most teams face and discuss some practical ideas of overcoming challenges to help you boost productivity and workflow among team members.

Related Article: Build And Manage An Efficient Remote Team With The Right Tool

Common Team Building Challenges That Team’s Encounter

Challenges are in every field of work, and so it is no different when you are trying to build a team or work with it. Here we have highlighted some of the most commons challenges that the managers often come across.

• Minimal or no leadership capabilities
• Trust issues among team members
• Poor communication & understanding skills
• Office politics, clashes & stress
• Dull working environment
• Confusion in understanding roles
• Lack of ability in long-shot thinking
• Zero diverse skill set & interest to learn
• Not being able to follow or delivers orders
• Lack of collaborative work tendency

In another study conducted by Robert Half Finance & Accounting regarding facing challenges in the workplace portrayed in the percentage goes something like this:

How To Resolve The Challenges In Team Building

It is not really possible for everyone to do everything. That is why you need team-building strategies to follow so that whatever challenges that you may face becomes solvable for you. Also, strategies are essential to keep your team all on the same page and ensure they are working at their full potential. This might sound simple on pen and paper but in practice, it is much tougher than it actually is.

So we have put together some of the solutions to common team building challenges that you will be able to easily relate and address to build a successful team.

Building Trust

For getting a positive result out of teamwork, having trust among each other is really vital. In other words, it can be said that trust is the single most important ingredient for holding a team together. Without it, your team might not be able to deliver the result of your expectations.

In order to build trust between your team members, it is essential to allow your team to come up with their own solution to a problem. Try to avoid micromanaging as much as possible. Always remember that your leadership is the key to building trust and boosting the spirit of your team.

More so, here are some factors that influence the build of good trust.

• Defying crystal clear expectations & limitations
• Frankness with one another
• Responsible attitude towards a given task
• Eagerness to solve critical issues
• Frequent communication & fruitful engagement
• Willingness to learn & listen
• Proving their trustworthiness to others

Developing Effective Communication

Lack of communication drill lowers your team’s morale which eventually affects the bottom line of the company as well as the departmental targets. In order to simply improve communication practice, try to take your team out for lunch or dinner at some nearby restaurant, or take them to watch movies weekly or monthly.

Such outings will have your team to converse more getting closer to each other breaking all the formal barriers between them. This will make them naturally open up feeling more comfortable with each other. Moreover, this also provides the opportunity for you to show that you are there for one another and ready to help whenever they need them with anything

Dealing With Poor Performance

If you don’t deal with the team’s poor performance early on then there is every chance it will put a dent on the motivation of your whole team. You need to address the individuals who are performing poorly that is impacting the whole team’s spirit. Have a difficult conversation with them if you need to but make sure they feel motivated to give their best. To make this whole process of dealing with poor performance easier, you may want to:

• Make him or her aware of the situation by talking it out. Ask questions to understand what their area of problem is.
• Discuss problems and ask relevant questions to find a solution together.
• Highlight and show examples of the time when things were going really well.
• Avoid layering it with any emotion while giving any clear and specific feedback or instruction regarding their performance
• Monitor the whole progress once you have set a definite goal and objectives.
• Be supportive being clear about your expectations from them and the time frame that you are going to allow for performance improvement.
• Review progress together by holding regular weekly or monthly performance review meetings.

Encouraging Collaboration, Sharing & Learning

For any team to perform well, there is no obligation other than to work together. Moreover to deliver top-notch and inventive solutions and results collaborative task doing is highly essential. There are four key sectors where the characteristics of solid team collaboration can be summed under. They are: Values Approach, Communication, Empathy (VACE)

• Values: Sharing the same values to be able to go the extra mile to deliver a good product or service.
• Approach: Collaboration isn’t something that can be done forcefully. You need to follow the right approach of encouragement, support, and feedback to motivate the team member to work together in order to bring the best out of them.
• Communication: To share the same ideas and understand the roles of each other, people are required to create the right culture of collaborative tasks. Encouraging team members to share ideas in any possible way possible is a part of an adequate communication strategy.
• Empathy: In any successful team collaboration, all team members listen and talk to each other in a similar amount to share their ideas regularly. A good team collaboration always support the idea of maintaining the right balance of support & motivation and listening to all ideas

So one can simply follow and apply these team collaboration, sharing & learning ideas into effective team building.

Improving Lack of Engagement & Purpose

For any business success, the engagement of a team is highly critical. Engaged team members are always passionate and interested in whatever they are doing. They always remain more committed to fulfilling the team’s goals and objectives. So finding out what each of your team members enjoys doing is really important for improving the lack of engagement. Based on that you can allot tasks to each of them so that they enjoy doing whatever you have assigned them to.

Now lack of purpose is directly related to a lack of engagement in a team. Working with a team and struggling or not enjoying being a part of it is usually due to the fact of the team having a lack of purpose. It’s difficult to bring the best out of any team from their work if they don’t even understand why they are doing it.

Especially when the work is with others then it becomes even more challenging. And this work without purpose attitude often leads to the below-par performance of the whole team. So set a definite purpose for your team and make sure everyone understands and feels it from their heart. Only then you will be able to build a team beyond just work.

Assigning Responsibilities Effectively

Being a leader doesn’t always mean you will have to have the attitude of ‘doing everything yourself’. It is essential to challenge this mindset and delegate the responsibilities efficiently. Learning the art of assignment of responsibility will not only help develop your team but will also enable you to focus on the strategic issues of it.

Here are some ways you can make the delegating process effective while you build your team.

• First, you may consider passing on some of your own tasks that would essentially be helpful for them to develop.
• Try to assign the job matching it, based on the interest and development needs of the teammates.
• Always get the idea from the other person about how you should proceed once you have explained to him/her the key deliverables and outcome of the task.
• Review tasks and check in on the progress regularly providing enough support and encouragement.
• Finally, accolade and appreciate to motivate each team member for the individual task to make them feel special. Provide constructive feedback to make them feel valued for whatever work they have done.

Overcoming Personality Differences & Clashes

Office politics & clashes are a part of every working domain. To add to that there are personality differences in each team member. This can get a serious matter if you do not neutralize their differences and clashes. So one shouldn’t take this issue lightly. This is why building an effective company culture really comes in handy. So instead of playing the blame game of who is at fault and what happened between them, you should focus mainly on looking forward to forgetting the past to build a satisfactory working relationship. And to help in overcoming the personality differences along with ego clashes, here are a few points to look into.

• Make it clear in the first hand about the behavior that is not acceptable with the team members in the company. Also, let them know what kind of behavior is to be expected from them all the time.
• Make the people involved resolve their personal issues and find a way to make them work together effectively. This means you would require to encourage individual responsibilities.
• Have a regular review of the behavior and change in the personality development progress of team members once you have sorted out the issues in the team. You do not want to deal with the same ego clashing fights and office politics after having a good few weeks all over again.

Developing Fore-sighting Ability

Being able to foresee the big picture is an exceptional quality to have for any team member. You would always want someone in your team who has a great sense of presence and has the ability to the foresight and rightly predicts every step that the team is about to take. The business’s nowadays have gone beyond urgencies and so be able to see the big picture beforehand and see whether everything fits together or not is highly imperative.

So for a team, this would mean they would have to think to see things beyond their own comfort zone. How things would turn out for the organization and how it would impact on the customer experience. This is directly linked to the business’s long term success and its sustainability. So make sure your team is getting the opportunity to think beyond their limits for the team and the company’s long-term success. As it would help them develop the fore-sighting ability and long-term thinking.

Getting Rid of Unnecessary Team Meetings

We all know how much valuable time we waste in a week or month in useless meetings. Unnecessary meetings are a complete waste of time and effort. So team lead or managers are required to cut down those time-consuming team meetings every time so that the team members can concentrate on more productive things in the day. So here are a few ways you can utilize your time better to avoid wasting too much time the next time you and your team sit together for a meeting.

• Plan In Advance: Have a clear plan for each of the attendees with relevant topics to discuss with them. Plan ahead & provide a clear idea about what you want to achieve and your company agendas are.
• Utilize Time Efficiently: Make sure you do not allow anyone to waste any valuable time with any irrelevant things inside meetings like reading the newspapers, talking & playing games on mobile, or having snacks. Make it a rule to concentrate fully on the meeting only.
• Make It Fast-track: Proper meeting planning in advance and utilization of time will automatically enable you to focus only on the important discussions & topics. This will even help you make your meeting short & precise instead of wasting the whole day in one meeting.
• Take Feedback: Take a review of the meeting from the attendees and ask the participants about how it went and how it could be improved in the future.
• Note Down Action Points: Mention and circulate the major action points along with the names for who will be responsible for what. Its always better to ask someone in the meeting to note down the key highlights & points of discussion in the meeting and hand it to the attendees after that meeting is over.

Reducing Dependency on the Team Leader

Over dependency on the team leader can be detrimental to team building just like one person dominating the whole team. Normally when a team is dominated by a single person in the team, this means all the team members are working under one qualified or experienced team leader. But too much dependency on team leaders is also harmful to effective team building. Therefore reducing dependency is highly essential to build a solid team.

Along with backing up the team and its members, a leader should also empower the whole team. Once the team is settled, a team leader should only be there to reconfirm any tough or essential decisions being made for any project. He should also define the team’s ultimate goal and what’s his role within the team. And at the same time, he would also have to let the team face the music under tough situations & encourage them to come up with solutions to tough challenges on their own without the involvement of him all the time. Only then a team can be said to be built on its own without relying too much on the team leader.

Team Building Success Requires The Best Tools To Overcome Challenges

So far we have discussed the challenges we usually face while building a team and how we can overcome them. But there is one crucial thing that we didn’t mention is that in this age of technology even successful team building requires help from a reliable team or project management tool like WP Project Manager that enables you to hold your team together in one place.

More essentially the tool helps the whole team to manage their task in a more organizing way than ever. This is definitely something that would help in overcoming a number of challenges like team collaboration, communication & engagement as discussed in the points above. So you might as well want to check out:

Moreover, if your team building concerns more with the HR department, then there is WP ERP HRM to keep your team or employee on the same page. This complete HR management module of WP ERP, covers almost every area of your employee management starting from leave management to employee profile to attendance to advanced reporting and more.

Employee profile & performance information from this tool would give the manager the right insight into the progress of every team member. This will help in understanding the lacking of any particular teammate that will eventually assist the team lead in trying to build a better team.

So you might also want to check out:

So that’s about it, we have come to the end of this post. If you have a team then let us know what strategy do you follow to keep your team together. We are hopeful that you will find this piece of write-up useful enough to overcome your team-building challenges.