Focus on Habits

One of the most frustrating hindrances to team productivity is a team member, who does not follow through with what they are supposed to. Sometimes people are busy with other projects or even forget about a promise they’ve made. Whatever the excuse is, that task still needs to be completed. One effective way to avoid this issue all together is to help them create “if-then plans”. For instance, if you need a specific person to give you a progress report every Wednesday, instead of asking them to send you a weekly progress report help them make an if-then task. If it is 3pm on a Wednesday, I will send a progress report. Research actually shows that in specific cases, using this type of direction can turn an event that normally has around a fifty percent likelihood of being done into one that is completed nearly one hundred percent of the time. If-then plans are a good way to create a memorable and specific goal for your team members to achieve.

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Groupthink is the problem

Whenever decisions must be made amongst a group, members have a tendency to focus on solely the information everyone has, rather than the collective information that everyone can contribute to the group. This is the phenomenon of groupthink. Studies show that when a group falls victim to group think in terms of making a decision the “most beneficial” solution is only chosen around 18% of the time. Groupthink leads to ineffective decision making and ultimately leads to failure in the project. It is crucial to encourage your team members to present their own insights and experience to a group decision in order to truly receive the best results from group projects.

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Set Goals

Although it sounds simple and maybe even obvious, setting specific goals for a team can have a tremendous impact on the success of a project. This does not mean saying things like “Let’s try to have a working demo of this done by Friday”. Similar to if-then plans, goals need to be specific and targeted. This means breaking down a goal into sub-goals and deciding precisely what action needs to be taken and who will do that as well as when they will do it. This allows everyone to know exactly what is expected of them and also ensures goals are strictly adhered to in order to promote success.

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Organization and Communication

All of these points have similarities in that they all are based around both communication and organization within a group. These two things allow teamwork to not only work smoothly but also efficiently without overlap or objectives falling through the cracks. As a leader, if you can improve on these areas, your team will accomplish exactly what they are meant to.