Is your team functioning at its highest level of potential?

Here are 8 questions to help you decide:

The first challenge that new teams often face is a lack of alignment. Usually happens when goals aren’t clear and common, and when there is ambiguity of roles and responsibilities. As a result team members quickly get siloed in their own agendas and egos instead of being focused on overall team results.

In Part 1 of this post I mentioned that collaboration trumps time management...every time. In others words, if you want to do things faster and better, instead of looking toward time management techniques to make 5% or 10% improvements, figure out how to work more effectively with others - on your team, across departments, and within the broader organization. For collaboration to work, relationships must be focused on open communication. How do you create open communication?

Collaboration trumps time management...every time.

We often seek to do things faster and better and as a result look for "time management" techniques for the answer.

The problem is that time management often results in us asking the wrong question - "How do we do what we are currently doing more efficiently?"

Instead...focus on working more effectively with others and you'll find yourself answering these types of questions:

What is your team's purpose?

What is your team supposed to do that no other team does?

These are important questions for all teams - whether you belong to a management team, a functional team, a project team, or other.

The challenge in most organizations is that teams don't have clarity about their purpose. They brush it off as something too fluffy to consider. Or, for other teams, their purpose ends up on a pretty poster in a conference room and does nothing but take up wall space.

Below is an excerpt from our latest article 3 Ways to Derail Team Formation.

Most teams struggle to reach their highest levels of effectiveness because of their inability to cultivate the right team of people from the beginning. As a result, communication breakdowns, unnecessary conflict, and poor decision making leads to a loss of key opportunities.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

In a recent blog post I stated that the number 1 reason why senior leadership teams aren't more strategically focused is....

"There isn't enough time."

And, you'll know your team isn't strategically focused if you spend the majority of your time doing what I call the "Round Robin" - where you go around the conference room table and everyone gives an update about their area that almost no one else cares about.

As heard in one of my team coaching sessions last week from a participant...

"If two people agree, you don't need one of the opinions."

The number one reason why senior leadership teams don't focus on more strategic things is.....

"There isn't enough time."

This came up this week, and that came up last week. Yada yada yada.

No wonder why senior leadership teams struggle so much to do little more than information sharing.

Are you tired of showing up at meetings and not knowing why you are there to begin with?

That seems to be the norm in most organizations.

The problem is that when there isn't a clear purpose and agenda for a meeting, people waste time and  energy endlessly talking around each other - never closing on decisions and moving actions forward.

Do you know what the Number 1 excuse is for not having an agenda?

"We don't have enough time."

People are too busy, overwhelmed, and overloaded.