Leadership Superpowers
Team plans come into their own as businesses grow more complex. For sole traders, making plans and responding flexibly to change is relatively straightforward, with just you to think about. But as you expand, focusing on achieving your objectives, while also empowering your people, becomes more challenging. Hence, the importance of team plans.
In this article, we look at what team plans are, and how they help businesses reach their goals. From there we look at what’s involved in effective team planning. And we take a lay person’s glance at some of the digital tech available to help implement team plans. Today’s planning technology offers a superb set of tools. But successful team plans still come down to setting clear goals, timelines and individual responsibilities, and leading the work. So make team plans one of your leadership superpowers, and help your team achieve their best.
The Plan is Everything
There’s a wealth of inspiring quotes about why businesses need plans. One of the most compelling is Alan Lakein’s “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” COVID has made team plans more critical than ever to businesses’ ability to navigate changing situations. Managing people remotely means keeping track of them even more than when you’re all together under one roof. But there are good ways and bad ways to do it.
Recent US studies reveal frontline managers leading remote teams in the pandemic worked harder to accomplish tasks and control output. They had less time to enable and motivate employees, which pushed work back at them. In larger businesses, these studies suggest, remote work plans should include an HR role to work with frontline managers. This will help managers plan time and resources to coach employees individually, pursue personal growth and fully engage the team.
But it’s not just about watching your time. Thibaud Clement is CEO and co-founder of Loomly, the collaborative brand success platform for marketing teams. When you create remote work plans, he suggests focusing on goals, expectations and outcomes more than the clock. Establish and clarify what people need to do to share deadlines, so teams can schedule for those requirements. And ask yourself: is a meeting about this really necessary?! Back to back Zoom meetings aren’t great!
Coming back to team plan tech, today’s powerful systems are wonderful, and end users talk about them with due reverence. But from simple shared spreadsheets to sophisticated planning apps, these are ultimately just tools to help achieve your goals. You’re still in charge. And you need to be clear how to keep an eye on progress and decide the best action to take.
Why do We Need Team Planning?
Team plans enable you to provide future direction and guidance to the team. They identify your goals and your purpose, and what individual members need to do to help achieve these goals. Team plans help build productive teams by promoting these elements:
- Effective communication.
- Delegation.
- Efficiency.
- Ideas.
- Support.
So What Actually is a Team Plan?
The following definition comes from Vale of Glamorgan Council. They’re not a commercial business, but this spells it out:
Team plans create a link between the overall plan and individual work programmes. They identify those improvement and service objectives that are relevant to the team. And they list actions and performance measures that support these objectives, against which each team will be monitored.
What Should be in a Team Plan?
- Your vision, goals and objectives: You need to involve the individual team members in deciding this. After all, they’re the ones who know their jobs best.
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): These will enable you to track progress and modify the plan as you go along.
- Expectations and observations: You must include your expectations in the plan and compare them with the end results. Observe what’s improving or hindering the team’s performance and take appropriate action.
- Timeframe: Every team plan needs a set time frame to achieve its goals. Ask your team members to help set the right timeframe for each task.
You Need to be SMART!
Speaking of timeframes, use the SMART framework in your team planning to decide what you want to achieve by a given date. The acronym spells out:
- Specific.
- Measurable.
- Achievable.
- Realistic and set in a.
- Timeframe.
Let’s Look at Some Different Kinds of Team Plan
Sometimes it may be necessary to write a team performance plan. This could be appropriate if the team is having difficulty meeting their deadlines. Reasons might include:
- They have problems relaying information to each other, impacting the workflow.
- There’s a lack of internal organisation.
- Team members lack professional communication.
- Individuals seem lost and unsure how their output affects the overall company goals.
In this situation, a team performance plan can do wonders, on an individual and company-wide scale. The four essential elements of performance management are purpose, outcomes, accountability and teamwork. With the plan in place, individuals know they are accountable for completing particular tasks within a clear timeframe. They also know they need to work with their colleagues to achieve them.
Team performance plans like this allow individuals to show their potential while working towards shared goals. But they can come across as directive, and leave employees feeling pressured and harassed. Particularly if they don’t feel they deserve to be treated this way, and think you’re being over disciplinarian. If that’s the case, you need to be firm about what you want done, but also support and encourage them.
Team Planning for Professionals and Specialists
Team performance plans work well when you want to improve the outcomes of task-based and repetitive work. It’s a different scenario managing teams of experts with professional or creative expertise. Here, team planning is about democratic leadership and co-creation.
10 Key Steps of Team-Based Planning
These steps are intended for teams with professional expertise, and differing points of view. They are particularly appropriate for developing projects:
#1: Situation Analysis
Before you begin the actual planning, provide a context, gathering insights so everyone starts in the same place. It’s important to make sure your team members agree on the current state of play! To fire their imaginations, maybe include some blue sky visioning about where they see the team heading.
#2: SWOT Analysis
At the start of creating your plan, use this proven method to pose some important, focused questions. Specifically, what do team members see as the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats you face? As they suggest ideas, ask ‘So what does that mean for us?’ Explaining what they see as the implication or impact of each point will focus their critical thinking faculties. It will encourage them to think like leaders and managers. And later, when you develop your objectives and refer to what they said in the SWOT analysis, they’ll feel valued.
#3: Stakeholder Analysis
These are the people your plan is likely to impact. In marketing, for instance, the stakeholders will include your production and distribution colleagues. Ask your team what they see their idea’s likely impact on them will be, and their importance to its success. You could do some team building here, asking team members to imagine the stakeholders’ likely response to their suggestions. You could bring a stakeholder in, to explain what they really think. Or, if you anticipate this suggestion coming up in your conversation, you could find out the stakeholder’s views beforehand. And then reveal their response to the team.
#4: Team Purpose
What are you doing, who is it for, and why? Asking this gives your team focus and clarity, defining and setting the framework for the team and how you work. You will concentrate their minds on delivering the right things to the right people. And you’ll underline the need to do it at the right time, and in the right way.
#5: Team Values
Shared values are an important ingredient of high performing teams. Look with the team at the values or behaviours that guide the way you make decisions and interact with each other. If you feel you need to, talk about conflict resolution and how they can manage their differences. This might lead to you doing some conflict resolution training. The point of this is to have everyone in agreement so you achieve your objectives in a way everyone approves.
#6: Setting Objectives
Here again, use the SMART framework in your team planning to decide what you want to achieve by a given date. If you can’t be specific, try putting a timeframe on it anyway. You can always change it. Also when thinking about objectives, think about your success factors. What needs to happen in order to achieve this? The answer will lead onto
#7: Resources and Support
What resources and support do you need to meet these objectives? Is it time, money, or other people’s involvement?
#8: Shoring up the Plan
What are you doing now in your business that’s not in this plan you’re working on? If you commit too much to your plan, you could neglect your core business. The plan needs to be balanced and realistic. You may need to let some objectives go.
#9: Creating a Timeline
Map where your objectives fall over the year. Identify the critical points and their impact on other areas of the business. Identify the stakeholders likely to be affected and check out your plan with them. This lets these colleagues see where you will need support and means you build better relationships.
#10: Keep the Plan Alive
Put your plan up in a shared space, and keep it updated.
There’s an App for That
This brings us to team planning technology. There are many team plan templates you can download for different jobs, in different kinds of software. They vary from shared spreadsheets to highly specialised apps for particular purposes. All of them assist in developing and improving teams’ performance, so they are efficient and productive in joint tasks. What follows is a non-technical overview. You need to talk to the experts and your peers about your specific requirements.
Microsoft Planner
This is a task management and organisational tool that integrates with the Microsoft Office 365 and Teams collaboration solutions. Using Planner alone means team members need to check it manually for updates and information. By integrating Planner and Teams, tasks can be viewed through Teams as well as Planner. This makes it less likely people will miss tasks they need to complete, wherever they’re working. And Microsoft Project Online provides enhanced project capabilities for resource management and capacity planning.
Toggl Plan
Toggl Plan is a simple digital workplace tool for remote and in-office teams to manage projects and workloads. Creative agencies, consultancies and implementation teams all use it. Originally a web app, it helps teams manage their time and juggle lots of different projects.
Notion
Notion is a project management system created for design teams, a workspace that adapts to teams’ needs. Its makers say it makes it easier for teams to collaborate, organise and ship projects faster than they ever have before.
Scrum
The Scrum project framework helps all kinds of businesses, including marketing and comms agencies, organise teams and do work faster. Scrum assists in delivering projects, breaking them down into workable chunks. The idea of Scrum is to work smarter and accomplish more.
Another growing area of team plan usage is tracking employees’ working hours and managing occasional workers and volunteers. An example is the downloadable teamplan app used by Mitchells and Butler the UK restaurant, pub and bar operators. M&B’s employees access their work schedules with it, and their managers use it to get their teams in line. Team plan applications like this use similar login processes to other online account-based services, accessed with email addresses and passwords.
And Finally: Establish Team Cohesion and Watch Them Grow
Team plans are there to serve leaders and managers. But they don’t have to be painful for the team members! Encourage your people to see team plans in a positive light, there to help them. And do what you can to bring the team together as one.
6 Steps to Establishing Team Cohesion
- Focus on common interests: It’s easier to get work done if people have well defined roles, and everyone knows what the others are doing. Set shared goals and a strategy to achieve them.
- Build trust: Your team members have their own unique way of going about their work. Trust them to complete it and build their confidence. As they work together, they learn about each other.
- Create a competitive atmosphere: encourage team members to create new plans and ideas. Reward innovation and recognise individual contributions.
- Train the team in conflict resolution.
- Recognise team achievements.
- Build healthy working relationships.
9 Components of an Effective Team:
- A strong sense of purpose.
- Measurable goals.
- Progress oriented.
- Abundant resources – tools , information, contacts – to get problems solved quickly.
- Effective communication.
- Individual responsibility.
- Proactivity – not just the leader, team members too.
- Consistent, constructive feedback about both the team’s performance and individuals’ impact.
- Emotional involvement: you do the job because you feel you want to, not because you have to!
You can boil these components of effective teams down to just four elements – goals, roles, processes and interpersonal relationships. If your team members feel fully involved and enjoy working together, their productivity will increase as they collaborate. And so will their job satisfaction and commitment.
See your team plans as one of your leadership superpowers. Not just to manage employee performance, but help your team find fulfilment in their work. And watch them develop and grow.
Action: For even more useful content on team building, check out our ultimate guide on Team Building Skills.
