In general, multiple minds work better than one mind alone. Consider things like surgery, your banking, and even education. We wouldn’t want any of these services or tasks tackled by just one person. A surgeon couldn’t operate without an entire team or fellow doctors and nurses backing him or her up. And banking requires the cooperation of the national and international community. No single teacher will be able to teach your child all the subjects from Kindergarten through senior year and also provide all the support services a whole school system can supply. Let’s extrapolate this need for teamwork into everything else. Almost any project will benefit immeasurably from an approach based on centralized teamwork.
Assembling the dream team
Finding a Team For Your Dream
The ideal team members for your project will depend on the type of project you’re undertaking. You may need a lot of people with expertise in the same field, or you may need a broad range of expertise, or both. The same goes with skill types. Without a doubt, however, each team member should be aware of his or her role within the team.
You might have a team premade for you, especially if you are part of a large organization or company. If you are taking on an independent endeavor, however, you may need to assemble your own team. You can do this by reaching out to people you know whom you’d like to work with, by posting a job opening online, or by utilizing a service such as Idea Connection. This service takes a look at the project you are taking on or the solution you are looking for and puts together a team of people from all over the world, using their database of solvers. This team works together, via online communication, to solve your problem.
Of course, a disorganized team could potentially cause more damage than no team at all, so it’s important that your approach be methodical and that all team members are onboard. A good team has strong leadership, either in the form of one person or a few people. Everyone should agree on who the leader is or who will have the executive decision in any matter. If it’s a large team with smaller groups within it, each subgroup should have a clearly defined objective. The team as a whole, of course, should have a common, unanimous, well-defined goal.
Communicating
5 Habits of Highly Effective Communicators
The success of your team, perhaps more than anything else, relies on communication. Communication should be understood by all team members. Communication needs to happen on a frequent basis, which means that every meeting may need to begin with a check in or that team members check in with the leadership each day to update on the progress of each goal, redefine any tasks, and reassert the project vision.
How do you do this? Many ways. You may need to have daily meetings, depending on the project and the team. The large team may only require weekly meetings, while subteams meet daily. In-person meetings are always the preferred and most effective method, but in our digital world teams may be comprised of people anywhere on the planet. If your team is made up of people who are not in the same geographic location, require regular meetings via a platform that you all share.
