This Young Professional Challenge is all about working with a new team and the things you can do in the first team meeting to set your team on the right track.
Starting a new team is an exciting time and a chance to work with new people, learn new skills and achieve new things. Teamwork has lots of skills and activities involved, you can find more tips and tricks as well as information on your other Young Professional skills by visiting your dashboard (this will only work if you are a registered).
Whether you are starting a new year in school, a new job or you have been put on a new project it can take some time for everyone to be comfortable and work together well.
We’ve got 3 tips for you tackle in your first meeting to help you and your team get off to the best start:
- Getting to know each other: There will be deadlines to meet and things the team need to achieve but it is really important you spend some time getting to know each other properly. You wont need life stories from everyone but make sure each team member has enough time to: Introduce themselves, you’ll need to know who your team members are, what you call them and how you can reach them. Talk about what they enjoy: what do you have a common or is there something new they can teach you? Talk about their strengths and weaknesses: these will become clearer as you work together but understanding early on who likes public speaking, enjoys writing, might be creative or a natural leader will help you understand how the team can take shape – it’ll also show you very soon what skills the team might be missing so you can all work together on filling them.
- The rules: It is important to set the ground rules of working in a team at the very beginning of the project. Make sure you cover: the rules you expect the team to work to, it might even be worth writing them down, they usually cover things like respect, communication (every has the right to speak and be heard), timekeeping etc. You should also agree what any punishments will be, will the person who is late for a meeting be the one who has to make the tea, or organise the next meeting?
- How will it work in practise: people will most likely be working in other teams and will have other priorities too. Spend some time in your first meetings agreeing how the team will work together, will they meet weekly, will it always be the same day? How will you stay in contact when the team can’t meet and how will you share work? What happens if someone can not attend a meeting, who is responsible for finding out what happens.
These tips might sound simple but it is worth taking the time to work them out, conflict often comes when people feel like they are being treated unfairly and it is often too late to set rules after something has gone wrong! Getting to know people and setting the expectations of the team early means that you’ll have more time to get on with the task at hand and hopefully enough time left over to have some fun too!
