Cross-functional teams are a fact of life in our organizations. As a team or initiative leader, you are competing with a host of other priorities and initiatives for the hearts and minds of your team members. Your group's performance depends upon you taking steps early in the team formation to ensure a healthy, effective working environment. Here are five ideas to help you jump-start your cross-functional team's health:
The general guidance on building effective teams is right, it's just often not specific enough. Here are 4 keys to building your great team that don't get enough consideration in most workplaces:
The team or project leader’s responsibility is not to find a way to squash the variance in personalities, but rather to foster the right environment for people who are different to come together and perform. Here are four key mistakes to avoid as you seek to align your collection of challenging personalities around your project and pursue great performance.
The essence of good leadership includes not only bringing great talent to the party, but also creating an environment that encourages people to come together around a clear and compelling purpose. How hard are you working at moving beyond the targets and numbers to help your team discover and focus on its' unifying purpose?
If you’ve ever been part of a truly effective team…a high performance team, you know the experience is memorable. For those who’ve lived and thrived on a high-performance team, the memory of what it was like to work with a motivated, caring, challenging (but respectful), accomplishment-focused group of individuals provides sustenance for the lonely, near-death experiences that characterize so many other team and project experiences in the workplace.
