How To Increase Listening Skills On Your Team
Listening is probably the most important skill that everyone needs to learn and practice. It is both the key to success and the main reason why teams fail to perform. Miscommunication causes hurt feelings, poor performance, and disunity. When people on your team listen to one another you decrease frustration and conflict and increase the overall respect and trust level between team members.

Here are three ways to increase your ability to listen:

Clarify content -Two powerful phrases that everyone needs to learn, "Did I hear you say...?" and "So you're saying..." There's no harm in being wrong. By simply repeating what you think you heard, you are letting the other person know that you are engaged and making a concerted effort to listen, and not just hear them speak to you. There's a big difference between listening and hearing.

Mirror the speaker - You can practice this one while driving. Put talk radio on and as the on-air person is speaking repeat everything he or she says within a second after the word is said. This is hard but valuable work to increase your ability to focus on the one who is speaking. Don't do it when you're with one of your team mates! Otherwise, you're liable to get hit. After a while practicing in your car, however, you will be able to mirror the speaker's words silently in your head. When you can listen closely to every word spoken, you'll understand everything people are telling you.

Stop what you are doing - Stop multitasking and focus on the person speaking to you. An executive I know literally realized that she had a bad habit. When her employees would come to her office, she'd be shuffling papers, finishing an email, or clicking on the web while her employee would be talking to her. When she realized that her multitasking was lowering her overall effectiveness as a listener and, consequently, her credibility as a leader, she made an important change. She told me, "Each time someone would come to my office, I literally would stop everything that I was doing, make eye contact with the person who was talking, and put my chin in my hands to keep my head still so that I could focus." Put stuff down. Stop thinking about all of the other "important" things you need to do, and show your respect to your team member. Dare to be present with the person speaking to you

Bottom line - When members of your team learn to listen closely, you will have a dynamic and unified team.

How To Increase Listening Skills On Your Team, Team Building Tips (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.teambuildingtips.com/team-building-articles/team-skills/how-to-increase-listening-skills-on-your-team.html

Foundation Blocks to Building an Effective Team
Building an environment of Teamwork requires effort on the part of all members within a team. It also requires other elements such as direction, structure, processes, team community and working environment to create effective teams.

However, the leader is crucial to the success of the team. He/she is the glue that keeps all these elements working synergistically. Team leaders bring people together with very diverse backgrounds, education, values, beliefs, or perceptions for a common purpose. Have you been tapped to lead a team? Consider these four fundamental blocks to building an effective team before you begin.

Build Trust

A confident team leader accepts the differences that exist within a team as a gift. This leader understands that diversity is important to the team's purpose, and so fosters participation and acceptance from fellow team members. This leader instills trust through humility and integrity, creating a safe environment for disagreement. This leader encourages healthy differences, and, when necessary, resolves unhealthy conflicts quickly.

Let go

While a strong leader has courage to face reality, accept the consequences, and make hard decisions, this leader also has the courage to share the control. They can step back from a situation and allow team members to tackle tasks in their own manner. He/she does not expect perfection only learning and growth. In fact, a great leader encourages members to take calculated risks in fulfilling their roles.

Clarify Team Purpose

No matter who you are, you cannot do a good job if you don't understand what your role is. An open and candid leader understands the purpose and goals of a team and can clarify these easily. He/she clearly articulates expectations and opportunities for the team and its members. A team leader is open to suggestions and is not offended when team members are reticent.

Develop Team Member Skills

A strategic leader knows they cannot be all things to all people. To grow the teams effectiveness exponentially, team member skills must be cultivated. This is accomplished by individual coaching, giving encouragement, and seeing that resources are available.

Conclusion

While these behaviors are only a part of the process, they are important in creating team relationship. These behaviors are the glue to a cohesive team. Teams cannot be effective if members don't trust the leader or each other. Team members become discouraged and resistant if they are tied to set procedures rather than given processes. And certainly, no task can be completed efficiently if purpose and goals are ambiguous or confusing. Finally, collaboration, sharing of tasks, guarantees goals can be met in a comfortable and timely manner. Leading a team can be an exciting and satisfying experience. Lay this foundation and your team will exceed all expectations.

Foundation Blocks to Building an Effective Team, Team Building Tips (n.d.) Retrieved from http://www.teambuildingtips.com/team-building-articles/team-leadership/foundation-blocks-to-building-an-effective-team.html

How to Steer Your Company Through Hard Times - Don't Neglect Team Building
All businesses need team building and not just in the good times. When times get hard, one of the instincts of any business is to pull in its horns and to cut spending. The first thing to go is usually the company 'jolly'; the corporate entertainment event. Then the next thing is to stop sending employees on team building. Why? Where is the wisdom in that?

Teams lie at the heart of corporate success. Whether these be management teams, sales teams, the team in the office, you will find them in the most profitable and successful organizations. But these teams don't just function well internally, they connect with each other - I have seen many companies in which the different departments hardly speak to each other! And when they do, it is usually through the managers. So without these sorts of events, how can you ensure that your workforce is contented, connected and devoted to the company? Then you wonder why the business starts to fail.

It is possible to save money on both and yet lose neither. Choosing the right corporate energizers can be both entertainment and training. Team building by stealth.

But what is stealth team building? Essentially, it is team building without ramming it down people's throats. Pick the right type of team building activity and the right provider and team building is corporate entertainment. The events should motivate and challenge the delegates, using the skills the need to function effectively as a team - communication, encouraging each other, lateral thinking ... Do this enough and it becomes second nature. The teams for the event should be randomly picked so that employees get to interact with people from other departments, management etc. There should be some worthwhile reward for the victorious team.

That is why something like a themed training day is ideal.

A couple of popular ideas are the medieval event and spy training events. In the medieval event, your employees can experience life in a medieval court, battling with a heavy boar to get it to the kitchen, building a trebuchet and using it to bombard a castle, learning to use a longbow, learning to joust using the quintain and rings and battling another 'knight' in a person on person joust as a grand finale. The spy training days are an altogether more contemporary team building event. Depending on the organizer, your teams will be involved in safe cracking, bomb disposal, setting mines, getting through a minefield, handling and transporting hazardous radioactive waste, identifying spies captured on CCTV, evasive driving, drive in shooting, escape and evasion ... in other words, a great variety of challenging adventure games.

So before you abandon all hope of team building or corporate entertainment days to motivate your staff, think laterally yourself and choose something that can do both. Your business might then continue to thrive even in the hard times.

How to Steer Your Company Through Hard Times - Don't Neglect Team Building, Team Building Tips (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.teambuildingtips.com/team-building-articles/team-skills/how-to-steer-your-company-through-hard-times---dont-neglect-team-building.html

The Number One Reason Why Teams Fail and Three Ways to Improve It
Recently, Stephen Smith of the Boston Globe reported on a study from Swedish researchers on ineffective management. "Workers saddled for four years with managers who were inconsiderate, opaque, uncommunicative and poor advocates were about 60 percent more likely to suffer a heart attack or other life-threatening cardiac condition."

The number one reason teams fail is a failure in relationships. The sobering fact from the Swedish study is that not only could bring about the death of your team, it could also bring about your untimely death.

"It is a proven fact that from 66 to 90 percent of all failures in the business world are failures in human relations." --Les Giblin

3 ways to improve relationships

1. Communicate clearly - Saying what you mean and meaning what you say goes a long way with team members. If you don't know, you don't know. Don't make things up or give a vague answer to save your face. Admitting that you don't know and committing to finding the correct answer is a great way to maintain relationships.

2. Show you care - Life is less about you and more about other people. Until each person comes to grips with that reality, the relationships on your team will suffer. Selfishness and internal competition between team members can create a negativity that will pull focus away from what's important. An atmosphere of care and respect will produce selfless team members willing to make sacrifices for the greater good.

3. Build and maintain trust - The fundamental building block to creating unity and synergy in a team is trust. When it's weak, your team's ability to perform weakens. When it's strong, your team moves forward to the future stronger and faster.

Bottom line: Improving the relationships is a matter of life and death.

The Number One Reason Why Teams Fail and Three Ways to Improve It, Team Building Tips (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.teambuildingtips.com/team-building-articles/team-skills/the-number-one-reason-why-teams-fail-and-three-ways-to-improve-it.html

Tips to Empower Your Team at Work
An effective action plan is only as good as its execution, and empowering members of the team doing that execution is key to its success. Following are some tips for bringing that about.

The success of any industry, company, or organization depends on the performance of the employees. Around the world, what makes any organization successful is how well-motivated the employees are. A successful manager gets optimum performance out of their employees.

This can happen only when the team leader, who acts as liaison between the team and management, is intelligent enough to grasp the policies of the company and is capable of translating them into motivational factors.

Some Tips to Empower Your Team

1. Clear Objectives. If staff is to commit to the success of the organization, they need a clear understanding of the objectives and purpose of the team effort. This enables participants to feel comfortable and confident about their contribution to the overall success of the institution.

2. Rewards. It is a basic human instinct for workers to tend to their own self-interests first. Therefore, they expect employers to reward them for a successful performance.

3. Recruiting the right people. This makes the job of the manager easier, and it can reduce conflict among the team members. Hopefully, well-chosen team members will work together for the common good of the company.

When this happens, a company becomes successful in the marketplace.

4. Establishing basic rules for getting the work done. This needs to happen at the outset, so the team members will understand how they are to proceed and how conflicts will be settled. Team members also need to know how decisions will be made and how results will be measured.

Keeping them in the dark about these things only leads to difficulty. Making each and every member of the team accountable for performance is vital to the attainment of goals and objectives.

5. Promotion of curiosity. This leads to high-energy teams that solve their own problems and go beyond the usual mediocrity that characterizes so many companies in the 21st century.

Managers who wish to distinguish themselves open the floodgate to the unique contributions their employees bring to the team, rather than insisting on generating all the ideas themselves.

6. Promote urgency. In order to make the team perform at a faster pace and give best results, promote urgency in completion of the task and it will lead to good results.

Keep tabs on all the work that has been completed and periodically keep team members informed about what they have accomplished, which in turn will motivate the team to perform well.

Team leaders can do many things to achieve high performance; these are only a few.

Tips to Empower Your Team at Work, Team Building Tips. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.teambuildingtips.com/team-building-articles/team-motivation/tips-to-empower-your-team-at-work.html