When it comes to business, nothing is more important than your team. A great team can take even a mediocre idea and make it successful, while even the most brilliant business plan and execution will fail without the right people on board. Your team is your primary resource when it comes to getting things done. The right team can help you tackle challenges faster, think outside the box with new ideas, and produce better work in less time. A weak or fractured team can bring even the best idea to its knees by creating conflict, inefficiency, and distrust. Understanding how to build a powerful team isn’t always easy—but it can be done with careful analysis of where your company stands now, followed by well-thought-out action steps that move you from a position of weakness to strength as a team.

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Build a Culture of Honesty and Transparency

Trust is at the heart of everything people do together. A lack of transparency and honesty can tear even the most talented team apart—and it’s a common problem in many organizations. When it comes to building a culture of honesty and transparency, you can’t just do it occasionally. It must be a core value. Not just a piece of paper we read every day. There are many ways to build a culture of honesty and transparency, from holding team meetings that are entirely transparent, to holding regular training sessions on key business topics, to creating a company-wide feedback loop. Building transparency by providing a clear mission and company values, and by making all major decisions and processes transparent and available to the team.

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Hire the Right People

Hiring the right people is one of the most important parts of building a powerful team, but it can also be the most difficult since most companies don’t have a clear hiring strategy that guides them in making their selections. Without a clear hiring process, you leave yourself open to jumping at the first person who applies and making decisions based on emotion. Instead, create a hiring process that is guided by a specific set of criteria, so that we can make smart hiring decisions that will help our company grow and succeed. Find out what hiring managers from top companies do to hire the best people. Once we have hired the right people, we must then empower them to find success and create the best work they can.

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Create a Roadmap for Growth

A company that has a clear roadmap for growth can build a powerful team by creating a path for employees to grow and succeed. You can empower your team to make the best decisions for the business by creating a roadmap for growth for them. Having a clear roadmap for growth for your team will help them understand the path they need to follow to succeed and feel a real connection with the company. A roadmap for growth should include not just what each job entails, but also the expected level of skills and training each employee needs to move to the next level. It should also include timelines for when different milestones are expected to be achieved.

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Establish Clear Communication Channels

Communication is the lifeblood of an organization. The more open and streamlined communication channels are, the better your team will be able to work together, and the more likely they are to accomplish great things. A communication channel is anything that links two people, information or ideas together. For example, an employee might email their manager about an upcoming project, or a manager might hold a team meeting to discuss a new strategy. There’s no “right” way to establish communication channels, but there are a few key things to keep in mind as you do so. First, you want to be consistent in the way you communicate. For example, if you always use email to communicate with your employees, you don’t want to suddenly start holding weekly meetings.

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Define Roles and Responsibilities

One of the biggest reasons that companies hire new employees is to help them solve problems with existing employees—but hiring the right person for the job means finding someone who knows how to tackle the right problems. Defining roles and responsibilities will help you clearly identify the problems your team is best suited to solve. It will also help you avoid creating a team that is too big and unwieldy, where communication and collaboration are difficult. For example, if your company hires a social media manager, you should consider defining the role and responsibilities of that job, and then comparing it to your other roles to determine whether it should report to the marketing manager, the COO, or someone else.

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Ensure Everyone is Equally Represented and Engaged

A team that is divided along racial, ethnic, and gender lines—or along any other lines—is a team that is weakened by in-fighting and mistrust. That’s why it’s important to make sure that every member of your team feels represented by the other members, and that every member is fully engaged in the work they do. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait for the team to become fully diverse before you can start addressing this issue. You can create programs and initiatives that help every member of your team feel like they are fully represented and engaged. For example, you can create a mentoring program that pairs members of different ethnicities and genders together to help each other grow professionally and personally. You can also institute policies in the office that ensure everyone is represented, including setting up a flexible work policy that works well for parents, offering health insurance that covers gender reassignment surgery, and more.

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Motivate with Positivity

Have you ever been a part of a group that was both highly motivated and had high morale? If so, you probably enjoyed coming to work most days. We were focused and enthusiastic, and we worked together to generate terrific ideas. Teams often become more motivated when they have a positive leader. This is why focusing on our own happiness, well-being and emotional intelligence is the first step toward creating a great team.


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