Tips for Managers to Rescue a Failing Team
All about the difference made by a great leader.
You will hardly come across a great team that has a weak leader. Great leaders build the foundation of great teams. It takes a lot of thought and effort for making a team successful. But, taking over a failing team is a whole new struggle. If you are going through that phase in your career when you have been asked to rescue a failing team, this post is for you.
“A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.” — Rosalynn Carter, the former first lady of the United States.
Team leaders have to be multi-talented people. Somebody might be an expert when it comes to subject knowledge but if he lacks the skill and desire to bring people together to work as a team, he can’t make a good leader.
Why Do Teams Fail at All?
If you want to culminate all the powers of a failing team, you first need to understand the reasons of their failure as a team. As I have mentioned before, teams fail most essentially for the lack of the right leadership. But, you need to look into the intricacies of the situation to figure out other reasons for failure.
Let us see what can these reasons be.
- It might be a team of some insincere workers who don’t want to give in.
- There might be a strong conflict among team members.
- Lack of right training and tools might also be one reason.
- Lack of appreciation or opportunity might be one obstacle in the way of performance.
Now when we are aware of the potential reasons for the failure of a team. Let us probe into the methods and techniques you can use to increase the overall output of a failing team.
Must-know Tips to Revive the Performance of Failing Teams
1. Build a rapport with your team
A strong sense of bonding with your team is a foundational step in making a team great. When you take over a not so great team, try to establish a good rapport with team members. Have an orientation session to discuss your vision and beliefs as a leader. They should know what you stand for and how will things progress in the future.
You should build a feeling of trust in your team members towards you. Make them feel that you all are part of the same larger goal. You should acknowledge that you are aware of their previous struggles that lead to bad performance. You don’t have to criticize or blame the previous leadership to win the hearts of your team. Rather, you can accept that there have been issues which could be fixed if everybody makes a sincere effort.
2. Ask for their viewpoint
The first induction meeting you conduct with them must involve a section where you give them an opportunity to speak. Let them hurl their hearts out. You should listen carefully to all they have to say regarding the current status of the team, the loopholes, the improvements required, etc. Doing so will bring a lot of insight into the personalities of your team members.
Once you understand how your team members feel about the team, you will get clarity about your next steps. Understanding if your teammates have a substantial vision or just a heard mentality will help you decide your tone and strategy.
3. Do not be too quick to judge
Don’t form a strong opinion about the potential and capabilities of your team members based on their past performance. There is every possibility that some dysfunctional experiences, bad leadership or faulty structures brought a downfall in their performance.
So always keep your hopes up and start from the crux. Take some time to assess the capabilities and limitations of different resources. A prejudiced opinion can lead to resentment and demotivation among team members.
4. Don’t point fingers too early
You might encounter a particular member of the team who is the root cause of the nuisance due to his bad attitude and policies. Do not point fingers at such people at an early stage when you start working with a new team. This will only have a bad impact and other employees will also feel insecure about their positions.
Take your time. Build trust. Let people understand why you do what you do. Once they understand your actions, then you can tackle such a nuisance creating elements head-on.
5. Define some ground rules
You must set some ground rules for your team so that everyone in the team can have a common understanding of how to go about things. You can rather make a written document called team charter so that you can revisit this charter in the future and solve the conflicts if any.
This team charter should mention the simplest of rules. All the concerns that affect the performance and well-being of a team like discipline, deadlines, targets, communication, inter-team conflicts, cooperation, goals should be legislated about in the team charter to avoid confusion.
6. Welcome constructive criticism
Leaders tend to give their team members the freedom of expression only on paper and not in practice. Such leaders cannot be great role models and processes can’t be improved. Rather, a good leader is approachable and can take criticism supportively.
The people on your team might be burying great ideas but never express them because they feel no one will hear them. Give full opportunity to your teammates to express themselves. Give motivation to any kind of expression coming from them be it vague ideas, at least acknowledge the effort.
Give them the opportunity to find faults in the policies and approach you are following at the moment.
7. Try to adopt a different angle
You might need to look at things through a different lens. Try using the new idea that you are hesitant to use. Repeating the same processes over and again brings a sense of stagnancy in the environment and makes people lazy.
Do not wait for your higher authorities to tell you to start doing things differently. Rather, be the first to initiate change. Think of how you can use some new strategies to help your failing team grow and perform better.
8. Make use of the right tools
Managers or team leaders sometimes ignore the fact that the right tools or equipment are as necessary as is the right approach towards meeting goals and make work organized and easier for the team. Your team might be lagging for the lack of a good tool that can help them coordinate and organize their work better.
ProofHub is one such tool that can make the life of the whole team very easy.
Let us understand what ProofHub is all about and how it can help you and your team.
Generally, a team has resources working on different tasks. There are many files and documents that you have to manage. There is a need for continuous communication within the team. Then you need to maintain a proper status report to show to the client. Finally, you have to deliver all your projects well on time.
You must be wondering how can one software make all this happen efficiently?
ProofHub has the ability to carry out all these activities.
“ Sign up for a free trial and see what ProofHub can do for your team.”
In simple words, ProofHub is a Project Management software. It has many features to organize all your documents, facilitate inter-organizational communication, to track the progress report of your projects, to increase the overall efficiency of your workflow and thus to deliver projects on time.
Let us have a look at these features of ProofHub.
Task Allocation
You no more need to assign tasks to your teammates by calling a special meeting or sending lengthy emails. You can assign tasks on ProofHub and everyone will be immediately updated about their respective tasks. The best part is that you can check the status report of the task just there and find out the stage of a particular task.
Assigning tasks on ProofHub can save you from a lot of confusion regarding who is doing what. Team conflicts can be kept at bay as there is a clear demarcation of roles and responsibilities. You can divide one bigger task into smaller subtasks and assign subtasks to different people. It brings clarity about the specific duties of people.
Discussions
Discussions is a wonderful tool for team collaboration. It is an easy platform for the team members to carry out all important discussions without using tedious email threads or calling meetings. You can subscribe to the concerned person to a particular discussion.
Discussions are a medium for people to voice out their opinions and new ideas. You do not need to jot down these ideas separately on your notepad for future reference as you have access to all this here in ProofHub’s discussions section.
Kanban boards
Kanban boards within ProofHub facilitate visual representation of your workflow. In simple language, you can view different stages of your workflow on board and track the pace with which work is moving from ‘to-do’ to ‘doing’ to ‘done’ stage. Kanban boards improve the overall efficiency of your workflow. You can always customize the Kanban boards within ProofHub to cater to your exclusive needs.
You can track how much time is needed to complete one task and calculate the loopholes in your system accordingly. You might have lesser resources as compared to the amount of work and available time. Similarly, there might be a chance that people are not being allocated enough work or are overloaded. By figuring out such loopholes, you can improve the overall efficiency of your process and deliver your projects on time.
“Switch to ProofHub. It can be the turning point for your teams.”
ProofHub provides you with more than thirty tools that help your team plan, create, collaborate better. Gantt charts, calendars, announcements, chats, proofing, timesheets are some of the other features within ProofHub that can make your life easier and your projects manageable.
Most of the time, team conflicts arise due to miscommunication. Better collaboration, transparent communication, clarity about roles and responsibilities, availability of all files and documents at one place, easy conversations can rescue a team from falling into the abyss of failure.
ProofHub being a cloud-based technology provides easy access to all the members of the team to its interface with just a login credential. If you are managing a remote team, then ProofHub is a blessing you cannot do without. Your clients can have a transparent update about every stage of the process thus mitigating the chances of any conflict on the completion of projects.
Conclusion
In today’s technology-driven world, the right tools are almost indispensable to ensure the smooth functioning of a team. Managers who provide the right tools to their teams are able to reap the right results.
The right attitude of the managers and the right equipment can solve most of the problems of a failing team.
We would love to know if you find these tips useful. You are most welcome to share your creative ideas on how a failing team can be rescued.
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