Determine responsibilities and avoid mistakes
Teamwork contributes decisively to the competitiveness of companies. Our current times offer many opportunities for sustainable transformation and the development of new models of collaboration that implement modern work structures. This creates new challenges and team dynamics and thus also a special opportunity for companies to reorganize teams and set them up for the future. In this context, team roles are crucial.
The people in a team, their behavior and their motivators are crucial to the team’s performance. When teams fail to achieve their goals and employees fail to do what they should, it is often because team dynamics are not taken into consideration and responsibilities are not sufficiently clarified. In order to achieve common goals, it is important that managers are aware that there are different roles in the team and that, accordingly, specific team dynamics arise that have an impact on cooperation.
In this regard, teams can take a cue from role clarity in soccer. During a soccer match anything can happen. Even if no one can predict whether the attack will come from the right or from the left, there will be no chaos on the field. The team acts and reacts according to their respective roles and assigned positions. Each position is so clear that it has a framework in which the players can act freely. This allows them to complete a significant portion of their tasks in a self-organized manner.
In this case, it can be seen that teamwork improves when the roles of individual team members are clearly defined. However, rigid job descriptions cannot be the answer for this, as they do not do justice to complexity and flexibility. Nevertheless, in order to avoid ambiguity regarding the scope of tasks, responsibilities should be defined by clearly assigning roles that are intrinsically determined. For the optimal distribution of roles, it is important to know the motivators of the individual employees, i.e., to understand in which areas the individual is intrinsically most motivated.
This is how you find the optimal deployment areas for the team employees
The assignment of a person to a team is sometimes made on the basis of the functional role. But this neglects important factors, such as behavior in the team context, core employee values, and individual preferences, which strongly influence performance.
To identify the optimal team role, it is necessary to find out what drives individual employees and how they work best. To do so, employees are analyzed individually in a team context. Here, it is crucial to ask honest and value-centered questions that focus on the employee’s preferences and add value for him/her. These are not queries about skills or competencies – the team role is initially to be seen here independently of the functional role of the employees.
By evaluating the questions, it is possible to identify the innovators, customer-centric thinkers, and high-implementation players in an organization. Role mapping helps leaders increase team performance by encouraging employees in their optimal team roles to demonstrate maximum commitment. It also quickly creates awareness among leaders of which types are represented on the team, enabling optimized leadership.
How does team formation develop?
An effective combination of the team members to the team roles results in an optimal team constellation. A resulting reorganization of the team results in innovative team constellations that were previously unthinkable, but which sustainably increase the team’s ability to act. The goal is to develop sustainable teams that cover all key challenges. In addition to current challenges, the team type and industry are taken into account – for example, marketing teams need a different composition of team roles than sales teams.
Effective team composition improves successful collaboration and thus team performance. A clear team lineup helps avoid mistakes by identifying problems and missing roles and showing where key action areas are unoccupied.
It is important that the team roles are not irrevocably fixed and that flexibility is maintained, especially when employees leave the team or new ones join, the team dynamics can change. In this case, it should be possible to adapt team roles quickly and easily.
Create a new way of collaboration with digital team optimization
One way to determine who is best suited to which role is to conduct a digital team analysis. In this process, all employees are analyzed in the team context with the help of the software and assigned to the appropriate roles, taking into account both the individual employee’s own assessment and the team’s feedback. This subsequently results in an optimal team set-up, which is displayed on the Playing Field Model.
The goal is to develop teams that work together effectively and reach a new level of performance to leverage their full team potential for change.
Team optimization at the organizational level
Every company has certain specifics. Digital analytics make it possible to understand these and derive decisions from them. The team tool draws on the experience of hundreds of teams to identify factors that are central to business success.
A company dashboard, which displays all the findings, shows which types of employees there are in the company and how the individual teams are set up. It also provides new ways to keep track of team potential in order to provide tailored offerings for teams. This makes it possible to target budgets precisely where support is really needed.