There are 3 must-have ingredients to make a successful team:
1. Alignment
Does everyone understand what our goals are and how we intend to achieve them together? If we are misaligned, no matter how hard we work, it’ll be in the wrong direction.
2. Transparency
Does everyone understand what progress we’ve made on achieving the goals we committed to? If we lack transparency, the team won’t know what issues require more focus and resources.
3. Accountability
Do we hold each other accountable to deliver results? If we aren’t accountable, it doesn’t matter if we know what the goals are and what progress we’ve made because we won’t have pressure to deliver.
These ingredients work together in sync… alignment, accountability, transparency. Getting a team to achieve them all is certainly challenging. It helps to have processes to clearly define measurable goals each period (i.e. year, quarter). From there, you should be doing weekly team meetings and sharing written status updates (I use the tool Weekly Update for this).
Getting this process right ultimately comes down to team culture. It requires a team who prioritizes communication, is radically honest with each other and never does politics. If a team can get that stuff right, they can be aligned.
