Eight Components for a Successful Team
By: Figo Muhammad
Tags: Team, Management And Leadership, Success, Teamwork, Human Resources

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

A team, by definition, is a group of individuals that are working together to achieve their goals. They can consist of just three members up to an entire army. They are dependent on each other to achieve the common goal in which they have determined. Collaboration is an essential key that cannot be erased in a team. In fact, a group of individuals can be defined as a team only if they have complementary skills and are collaborating.

“A team is a group of people who are interdependent with respect to information, resources, knowledge and skills and who seek to combine their efforts to achieve a common goal.”

— Professor Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management

1. Responsibility

Responsibility is the main factor in the success of the team’s common goal. Without responsibility, no team can achieve its goal. Being responsible means fulfilling our promise. Being responsible means making a real effort to complete tasks that we have accepted. Therefore, it is a must to understand the task and the goal in the first place. In an effective team, the leader must distribute the tasks clearly and each member must be responsible for their own task.

2. Flexibility

Flexibility is the ability to make changes when, where, and how a task is going to be completed. Flexibility is the ability to readjust a goal in a short time. Flexibility is the ability to tackle unexpected tasks effectively and calmly. Flexibility corresponds to minimized bureaucracy and encourages an innovative environment.

It is a necessary component as it affects the effectiveness of a team. It can improve the satisfaction of the work, the engagement between members, and it can also reduce stress.

3. Proficiency

Proficiency, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, means the fact of having the skill and experience for doing something. It means sacrificing energy and willingness to excel in completing the task, beyond the minimum criteria.

Although covering all aspects is quite hard to achieve, having proficiency in every member of a team will increase the team’s effectiveness. It will lead to an excellent job in a task.

4. Accountability

Accountability is a term that is sometimes interchangeable with responsibility, but they are different. Responsibility means the duty to complete a task, whereas accountability means the duty to give an account or report of a task, experiences, and events. It happened after the work of the task. Responsibility can also be shared with other people in a team, whereas accountability for a specific task should be assigned to one person. It is to prevent thoughts between the assignee that his/her colleague(s) has taken charge of the task. The one who is assigned must take the potential consequences if the task was failed to be completed.

5. Consistency

Another important component is consistency, especially as a leader. A team needs to be consistent in performing tasks, maintaining the standards, and pursuing a sustained environment. It will help people (outside and inside the team) know what to expect. Because of that, they will make better planning because of the more accurate prediction. Hence, trust is built.

Consistency also means staying firm on track during rough times and maintain a solid vision ahead and the most important note is that to be consistent requires patience at a high level. One of the concepts that I like about consistency is the “20 Mile March” concept from the book Great by Choice by James C. Collins.

The 20 Mile March is a concept developed in the book Great by Choice. Enterprises that prevail in turbulence self-impose a rigorous performance mark to hit with great consistency — like hiking across the United States by marching at least 20 miles a day, every day. The march imposes order amidst disorder, discipline amidst chaos, and consistency amidst uncertainty. The 20 Mile March works only if you actually hit your march year after year; if you set a 20 Mile March and then fail to achieve it, you may well get crushed by events.

- James C. Collins, on his website

6. Resolve

Resolve means strong determination according to the Cambridge Dictionary. To become a resolute team, clarity of the team’s goal is required so that each member can do their own role in achieving that goal.

7. Commitment

A commitment of a team means each member understands and agrees to support the team’s decision even though he/she disagrees in the first place. Commitment is required in a team to move forward, a team where its members getting behind the team’s decision wholeheartedly.

Intrinsic ethical values relate closely to the team’s commitment. A team that displays strong fondness towards ethical values in its members shows relatively high commitment. Therefore, it is necessary to build a strong sense of ethical values, such as righteousness, honesty, justice, truth, etc. to make a team committed.

8. Satisfaction

Satisfaction implies how satisfied and content team members are inside their teams. Increases in satisfaction mean increases in motivation in a team. There are three types of satisfaction that are needed to be fulfilled to make an effective team: material satisfaction, environmental satisfaction, and spiritual satisfaction.

Material satisfaction means a financial reward of a member based on their performance. It is one of the boosts of the motivation of a team.

Environmental satisfaction involves the working atmosphere in which team members communicate with each other when conducting their tasks and the most important key is respecting each other, helping each other, and staying united.

Servant Leader

There is this theory of leadership in which the leader’s main purpose is to serve. A servant leader shares control puts the employees’ needs as the main interest and encourages individuals to grow and perform as highly as possible, whereas, in practice, the leader’s main concern is the prosperity of their company or organizations.

“Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?”

— Robert K. Greenleaf

This type of leadership may be a good choice for your team. Little experiments may be needed.

My Team — Siprak Team

I am now currently working on an application called Sistem Informasi Penilaian & Database Praktikum with my friends: Fransiscus, Harold, Figo, and Edina. It is an information system application for a faculty at my university, Universitas Indonesia. Our team is not developing the application from scratch, rather, we are continuing the work of previous developers (our seniors). I would love to tell my experience with this team. I hope this story can help you get more insights in the practical term.

One team — one spirit

— My team’s slogan

Experiences

My team uses a Scrum framework and Agile principles to follow as it is a good methodology in developing a highly complex application. In Scrum, we breakdown tasks every two weeks and assign a single person to each task. Hence, accountability and responsibility is greatly controlled

Using Scrum also makes the team pretty flexible in changing direction. We can decide to change direction at every two weeks (every sprint planning event). To learn more about Scrum and Agile, you can read my other article about them.

Although, at first, we lacked skills in using tools to develop the application like ReactJS, having a strong will of learning makes our skills improved greatly. Not only we are able to develop the application, but we can also identify and fix mistakes that were made by previous developers. Helping each other is also a value that my team has and this really helps us become proficient in many aspects.

Consistency in my team is also pretty decent. We can nearly finish all the tasks in every sprint (every two weeks). Although, we had a bit off guard in some sprints like missing some daily working schedules. We evaluated the mistake early. Scrum also helps us in staying consistent because there is an event after a sprint called sprint retrospective. There, we evaluate what was good and bad in our team and then find the solution to tackle bad things and keeping the good things.

All the members of my team are also pretty resolute towards the team’s goal: make the application works and also pass the course with a good grade. In addition, some of us just love developing software.

Using Scrum also needs each member to be honest and open to each other and thank God, these are the values that my team has. This value helps us being committed to the team direction by being honest and open in every discussion. Although there were some disagreements, it can be resolved quickly.

Team Capacity Building

Besides the primary eight components needed in a team, I think openness, as I mentioned earlier, is also needed to make an effective team. this component and the other eight components build trust in each other. In my hometown, there is this proverb “Tak kenal maka tak sayang” or in English, “Do not know, then do not love.” It means that getting to know each other is needed to build love in the team.

Although we have known each other for 2.5 years because we attended the same classes every semester, we still held a team-building event in order to make us more closer. Because of the Covid-19 situation, we could only hold it online. We played a game called skribbl.io where someone draws a thing and others guess what the drawing is. This game made some laugh in the middle of stressful times. It helped us become more open with each other.

Team Siprak playing skribbl.io

“Tak kenal maka tak sayang.”

“Do not know, then do not love.”

Conclusion

A team must have these eight plus one components to be effective and efficient in achieving its goal and. Although being perfect is a difficult task, I encourage you to improve your team consistently because small acts will lead to a big act. I hope this article helps you all. Any feedback and comments are highly appreciated. I would like to say thank you to all the authors of the references below. Bye!

References