Time Management & Team Building

An efficient team knows how to manage time well.

Proper time management erects achievable performance guidelines that maximize the abilities of your team members in accordance with reasonable deadlines. Good team building encourages your employees to invest themselves in a project. Get to know each member of your team by asking them about their personal and professional goals. Use what you learn to fine-tune the team goals you set.

Setting Reasonable Goals

Carefully chosen, reasonable goals allow your team members to measure their performance against an achievable standard. Poor goal-setting, on the other hand, makes your team want to throw their hands up in frustration. Do not ask your team to perform unreasonable tasks, conform to unclear guidelines or meet overly optimistic deadlines. Instead, determine what is difficult but possible within the time constraints your employees face, and then set goals to achieve just that. Add rewards for exceeding goals.

Building an Effective Team

Good team management capitalizes on individual skills. If some members of your team are better at a task than others, set goals that allow them to take charge of that area. Distribute labor based on ability, and you will find that your projects proceed more efficiently than if you haphazardly assign tasks. Over time, as your employees gain even more experience in a specialized area, your results will improve. This approach to goal setting also minimizes redundancy by ensuring that only a few people devote time to a certain task.

Managing Time Well

Reasonable team goals set meaningful boundaries, allowing your team to focus on tasks without worrying whether they are wasting their time. For example, suppose you set an unnecessarily tight deadline for the completion of a project. Your team members would work hard to meet that deadline, perhaps neglecting their own personal lives to do so. But once they find out the deadline is arbitrary, they will regret having put your goals first.

Rewarding Your Team

If everyone on the project feels their labor will lead to personal benefits, they will be more likely to involve themselves and work hard to achieve team goals. But if any members of your team feel shut out, they have less incentive to contribute. Design goals that evenly distribute the rewards of a successful project. Evenly distributing rewards has the added benefit of minimizing cliques and rivalries because people no longer have to compete to secure rewards.

References

• U.S. Office of Personnel Management: Improved Performance Starts With Planning
• Bloomberg Businessweek: How to Build a Winning Team