Is Your Team a Winner?

Now you have a team, put together your priorities, defined team and individual responsibilities and ready to take on the challenge of achieving the overall objective. However how do you know if your team is up for the job?

Theodore Roosevelt once said "The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick god men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it."

In business school (most of them) talks about The Team Model, its a kind of principle on how to judge your team. This takes into account the following
* Do you have the right members in your team?
* Are the right people in this project?
* Are the skills of the team members corresponding to their objectives?
* Is the entire team capable of delivering to its promise?

OK. How do you use this model to judge your team. It’s quite simple actually. Begin by defining the skills, expertise and resources you think are required for successfully carrying out the project. Give particular importance to the skill sets that are really necessary for the job at hand. Distinguish between soft skills and hard skills. Soft skills are in the line of loyalty, reliability, motivation, drive and commitment. Hard skills include programming, negotiations, foreign languages, problem solving, etc.

For each skill set define where your critical boundary lies from a scale of 0 to 10. For example Java programming could be 7 while algorithm expertise is 9. Now judge your team members according to the criteria you have laid down. To find out the team’s strength and weaknesses simply connect the dots.

I played competitive basketball so let me use that as an example. Now let's take the most popular basketball team, the Los Angeles Lakers. I have illustrated the team model below:

As you can see the team is very strong, however when they face a long, emotionally filled and very heated they have the tendency to crumble.