The Secret Ingredients to a Successful Design Team

The Path to Performance

Promptitude in solving problems, excellent communication, great professional work training, identifying with the company’s values, taking on responsibilities and creating performance in everything you do are among the secrets that will lead to a successful company team.

Image source Animation Concept via Flickr

Let’s take, for example our case, the design studio where I am working. We are all a team here. The success of our company depends a great deal on the way we collaborate and on the rest of the things mentioned above.

Besides our regular tasks, we all need to work on other aspects such as time management, communication, being goal oriented and so on. So even if we are in a creative field, being a part of a team automatically we are impelled to do our best, to make the team and implicitly the company successful.

The importance of team working has started to get some extra attention in the past years when, analyzing the results of some companies, statisticians have come to the conclusion that the efficiency of the teams have lead to activity improvement in most companies. You might think that this conclusion is obvious and working in teams is easy but read further.

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To create an efficient and successful team, the human resources department (if there is one in your company) has to take in consideration a couple of aspects such as:

– the team members must be compatible – considering their abilities – with the activity they have to deploy.

– on the other side, the team must be formed in a homogeneous way, considering the attitudes and values shared. This will only lead to teams that are  stable and durable in time and to the satisfaction of the members, as they will feel like they are part of that group, that they belong there.

A successful team is a team where the members develop interdependent relations, influence each others behavior, communicate efficiently, assume different roles while achieving the company’s goals.

Team Building

To create a great team takes time because, until the moment the team reaches its maturity, it has to go through a few development stages.The time necessary for this process variates according to the number of team members, the competencies searched and so on.

1. Identity

This is the step where you must establish the mission of the team (a clear, concise formulated mission), choose the leader and the team members.

Image source: Crayon2papier via DeviantArt

Establishing the identity and structuring the members of the team is the key to a good activity of the team. It’s obvious that the leader of the team has more competences, while it’s indicated that the rest of the members have a similar level.

The members of the team must know very well their attributions, what are their responsibilities and who they have to report to. Setting the roles of each and every member of the team is essential for the well being of the team.

2. Competition and issues

This is the stage when competitions, tensions, frustrations and conflicts take place. It’s not entirely bad because disputes lead to better, more realistic new objectives and this step is important for testing the trust spirit between the members of the team.

Image source: P Shanks via Flickr

3. Resolving issues

In this stage, the team must resolve the issued that generated tension between the members, procedures are created – regarding the tasks of the team and of individual members in the future, the work flow, communication, decision taking, behavior and the individual level of commitment.

4. Maturity

In this stage, the team is fully productive only if each and every one of the members dedicates its full energy and creativity to reach the goals established. Now, decisions are based on a careful analysis, because each member of the team presents its ideas, which are studied and reformulated until they end up reflecting the position of the entire team (they reach common ground). This way, the final result is satisfying for everyone and each person has the feeling that the result belongs to him, as a member of the team.

Your turn now.

How do you get along with the members in your team? Did you ever had a conflict and how did you resolve it?