MANAGEMENT SPECIAL.............. Is your team `lost'?

Is your team `lost'?





THE PERILS OF A DIRECTIONLESS TEAM ARE MANY

When teams try to function without a sense of longterm direction, the future can appear murky and uncertain. Under such circumstances, team members may begin to feel that their actions lack purpose or meaning. The team members may experience greater difficulty in sifting through competing priorities and figuring out what's really important and where they should focus their attention and energy. Let's look at some of the symptoms of a directionless team.

THE BIG PICTURE IS BLURRED

The first way to spot a directionless team is to ask if your team members lack a clear overall picture of the desired future. An inability to visualise what the future success scenario looks like makes it difficult for them to connect how their day-to-day efforts are adding long-term value to the organisation. Because the team members don't understand how their individual functions fit together, they cannot respond to questions or address issues that lie outside their immediate field of vision.

COMPLETELY DEPENDENT ON THE TEAM LEADER

If your team members constantly look up to you for guidance and direction, you have a big problem at hand. Because they lack a sense of direction, they frequently stop to get the marching orders from you, rather than taking the initiative and determining the course of action on their own. This start-and-stop syndrome reduces the flow of work and additionally they will attribute all failure to the team leader, forgoing the opportunity to glean learning from what did not go as per the plan.

MULTIPLE PRIORITIES

A lack of clear direction makes it difficult for the team members to choose between competing proj ects or assignments.Instead of using the organisational priority as the filtering tool, they end up using ease of work or personal preferences to allocate their time and accountability to an assignment. In such cases, team members may also feel that they are working at cross-purposes and may push personal objectives at the cost of the team's overall success. The team members will be hesitant in committing themselves to projects because they don't know how important those projects are in relation to their overall responsibilities.

Remember, high potential achievers are motivated by a strong sense of achievement. Within a directionless team, such members may fail to conquer the milestones they want to achieve. On the other hand, mediocre performers love a directionless team, because they can, with ease, hide their lack of skill or contribution behind the team's internal confusion. A lack of clear direction gives them the comfort that they will be judged by number of hours and not by value added to the overall team's progress, for the scale itself is missing. You run a real danger of attracting and keeping low performers and driving away talented employees.

Jappreet Sethi

-The author is an HR and a business strategy professional and author of Humanresourcesblog.in

TAS 8DEC15