Team Building

The ability to recognize tactics such as task alignment with organizational goals, recognizing top performers, goal-setting, and cultivating a culture of creativity and confidence are all important skills for a supervisor to possess to create an inspiring work environment. Supervisors should also understand the importance of team dynamics, which includes open communication, teamwork, developing leadership skills, solving problems quickly, and being aware of the stages of group development.

Learning Objective

The learning objective is for a supervisor to gain an awareness of the crucial components that support both team and individual motivation and productive team dynamics in an organizational setting.

Motivation:

Motivation is a key component of team development and discussing your goals as a team. Giving team members a stake in the team’s direction and the sense that they have a role to play in its growth motivates individuals.
Motivation in the workplace is outlined as something that energizes employees to bring commitment, enthusiasm, high energy level, and creativity to the organization daily. Employee motivation creates a willingness among themselves to produce results to the best of their abilities.
Motivation enables management to meet the organization’s goals. Without a motivated workplace, organizations could be placed in a very risky position. Motivated employees can lead to increased productivity and allow an organization to achieve higher levels of output. Imagine having an employee who is not motivated at work. They will probably use the time at their desk surfing the internet for personal pleasure or even looking for another job. This is a waste of your time and resources.

Ways to Create a Motivating Work Environment:

Create tasks that are beneficial to the organization. Every employee wants to feel that their job makes a difference. If an employee feels like his/her work doesn’t mean anything or isn’t actually contributing, most likely he/she will not be motivated to even accomplish the task. As an employer, ensure that a majority, if not all, of your employees’ tasks, have a direct benefit or contribution to the overall success of your organization. Strategically created tasks that directly affect the organization will energize and motivate the employee to perform to their best ability.
Hire top performers. A study performed by Leadership IQ in June of 2006 showed that 93% of employees felt that working with a low performer decreased their own productivity. Top performers should have a certain degree of self-motivation, to begin with.
Show appreciation. Appreciation can be a simple “good job” or “nice work.” It will only take a few moments out of your day to show your employees that you notice their outstanding work.
Set goals. A goal is a result that someone is expecting to achieve successfully in a designated amount of time. Create a list of goals that an employee or the overall organization could reasonably attain. Choose somewhere to display the goals.
Display confidence. Show that you trust your employees to make the right decisions for the overall well-being of the organization. To an extent, allow the employee to be creative in their job tasks.

Team dynamics:

Team dynamics describes the behavioral relationships between the members of a group. The dynamic between them includes how they interact, communicate, and cooperate. How well your team can do these things directly influences what it can accomplish.
Team dynamics describes the behavioral relationships between the members of a group. The dynamic between them includes how they interact, communicate, and cooperate. How well your team can do these things directly influences what it can accomplish.
Good team dynamics means collaboration is seamless, communication is transparent and effective, and teams are able to set future goals and work toward them. Good team dynamics are also prime environments for innovation and creativity, meaning that teams can best serve their customers. In short: good team dynamics are integral to how effective an organization is overall. This means that when teams have good dynamics, customers will be happier, and more outcomes will be desirable.

Ways to Create Team Dynamics:

Build communication. Transparency and effective communication help teams achieve their goals successfully and much more easily. Not every team member may have developed communication skills by default. You could use various techniques to encourage your employees to work on their communication skills.
Develop collaboration. Collaboration is the key to successful project accomplishment. When each team member gets deeply involved in collaborative work, they are more willing to share new ideas and aim at achieving a common goal with high results. For this, you need to develop collaboration within teams and spread this practice over the whole company.
Help team leaders to develop. Team leaders are the driving force at the core of every team. This way you should have your team leaders be strong and experienced professionals who can set goals and delegate tasks in the team effectively. Set for team leaders, essential areas of improvement to help them develop their leadership skills. These could be time management skills, organizational skills, public speaking skills, people management skills, and others.
Solve problems quickly. No team exists without conflicts of opinion and interests. Therefore, in case you start observing conflicts in your team you need to address them quickly. For this, get your team members to talk. It can be a private conversation or a group talk depending on the situation – every team and person is different in this respect. The aim of this strategy is to encourage your team members to speak openly and prevent them from hiding their real thoughts and emotions. Conflict resolution helps team members to keep positive dynamics within the team, excluding sarcastic and joking attitudes in interpersonal communication.
Follow stages of group development. Every group passes more or less the same stages of group development. This way you can foresee and prevent possible difficulties each team member can face in the group and channel team dynamics in the right way. It’ll help you to avoid lots of issues in the early stages of your group forming and prevent them along the working process.

Local Government Education

Division of Extension