Building an Effective Management Team

Creating and building an effective “management team” can enhance organizational success, performance and competitiveness.

Building a management team becomes important when an organization grows beyond a founder and a few employees. As an organization grows it becomes more complex and the leader directing the organization cannot have their fingers on all the decisions.

There are many other applications of team building, such as a project team or a sales team, but that is a separate topic and not covered in this discussion.

Definition

Building a team at its simplest level means creating a group of people working towards a common goal.

Forming a Management Team

Forming a management team could be as simple as gathering the president/executive director together with the division managers. One issue to consider is whether the makeup of the management team represents the different views and functions in the organization. If a view or function is left out, for example accounting, an important point of view may be missing in some discussions. This could undermine implementing change or new initiatives in the organization.

The team should be large enough to present a diversity of perspecives and ideas. Group size whether too small or too large can reduce performance.

Team Building

Some fundamental activities to build an effective management team are:

• Clarifying the team goals
• Identifying those issues which inhibit the team from reaching their goals
• Addressing and removing the inhibitors

Management Team Functions

Once a management team is up and running and proven its ability to operate as a team it can tackle many organizational activities:

• Problem solving of challenges and crisis that face the organization
• After Action Reviews – review how the organization performed after the fact and internalize the lessons learned throughout the organization
• Planning – development of the strategic business plan for the organization
• Review of organization performance; financials
• Forum for information sharing
• Implementing and communicating changes and new initiatives in the organization

Related Best Practices

• Building a Team
• Building a High Performance Team
• Ideal Group, Committee or Board Size

Other Resources

• “6 Ways Successful Teams are Built to Last” Forbes, Oct, 2012; Glenn Llopis discusses leadership techniques that build a team.
• wikipedia : Team building Wikipedia page discusses more generally team building in multiple settings.
• “Guide to Managing Human Resources, Chapter 14: Team Building”University of California, San Francisco – review steps to building and effective team and organizational benefits
• “Build a Tower Build a Team”, TED talk by Tom Wujec – lessons learned from teams building a tower from simple materials.

Author

The author of this article is Terry Gardiner.

Terry Gardiner is the founder and President of Silver Lining Seafoods and NorQuest Seafoods - a medium-size Alaska seafood processing company; and currently a Board member of the Anvil Corporation, an employee-owned company specializing in oil and gas engineering.

His co-operative experiences include member director of the Commercial Fishermen Co-operative association; creation of legislation for the Alaska Commercial Fishing and Agriculture Bank; and advisor to the US Dept of Health and Social Services for the state Health CO-OPs.

Terry served ten years as a member of the Alaska House of Representatives -several legislative committee chairmanships, Speaker of the House, Chairman of the Alaska Criminal Code Commission and board member on various state and federal boards and commissions.

His non-profit experiences include National Policy Director for the Small Business Majority in Washington DC; working with the Herndon Alliance and ForTerra.

Terry authored the leadership book, "Six-Word Lessons to Build Effective Leaders: 100 Lessons to Equip Your People to Create Winning Organizations".

For more check: Terry Gardiner Long bio