Small Business Growing

Team Work for Small Business (1)

If you are a small business with more than one person, you have a huge potential for team work, and all of the competitive advantages that it can bring.

However, for many small businesses the potential for team work remains just that…a potential, not a fully realized benefit.

There is a huge range of team effectiveness among small businesses, from totally dysfunctional to extraordinarily productive and well integrated.

The primary difference, the source of great team work on the one hand, to barely cooperative on the other, is in the leadership.  And for small business that usually comes back to the ownership.

In this series we are going to lay a foundation for effective team work by starting with team meetings. It is not the only place to start building great teams, but it is a good place.

Meetings are one of the key building blocks through which teamwork can be crafted and refined.   We’ll start by talking about foundational principles that I hope will add a little something to how you think about and manage meetings.

If you don’t have particularly productive team meetings, let me remind you of two things you probably already know.   The first is that the human talent within your organization, your own included, is the greatest single resource you have to improve your business.  The second thing is that team meetings are one of the primary culture building and performance enhancing vehicles to take your business to its next level.  The point:  if you get better at managing team meetings you can help build talent and shape a more productive culture.

But I can tell you for sure that it won’t happen automatically.   You will have to invest some time experimenting, learning, and enhancing your ability to lead more effective team meetings.

Let’s start with thinking time.

Before we get into some very simple strategies to run better meetings, I’d like to encourage you to think about the overall level of team cooperation within your small business.  Most small business owners are necessarily involved  in keeping the business going by dealing with the urgencies and priorities of working IN the business.  Working ON the business by thinking about things like team work and productive meetings can seem like a luxury.  But it is a necessary luxury if the business is to grow

Think about how much real teamwork you have now.

• How well coordinated are the players in your organization?
• How does the communication flow between people?
• To what degree do people in your business feel part of the business rather than “hired hands.”

Next time we’ll start to outline a set of very straight-forward steps you can put into play to build a culture of effective team meetings.  If you see this as something your business needs to work on, spend a little time on those questions, and do some serious reflecting on just how much your business functions as a team.  This will help you clarify your own concept of the difference between a small business that functions with a very high level of team work, vs. those that do not.

And I am not talking about a “text book” state of team heaven.  I am talking about learning to gradually move up the performance ladder to a better place.

I also invite you to read about a tool we use to build customer relationships.   If your business needs strong customer/client relationships to grow, you should read this section of our blog.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 15th, 2010 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Teams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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