Question

What factors should a manager consider when deciding on the composition of a team charged with making an important decision?

Answer 1

Factors that a manager should consider when deciding on the composition of a team charged are -

1. Understand Vision: It’s important that your team aligns with your overall vision because everyone functions as a unit. This means that it’s important to assert your goals and expectations. Let your team know the culture you want to build, as well as future plans. This ensures that you and your team are on the same page and the likelihood of you receiving your desired results are increased.

2. Identify Individual Strengths: Your team should be diverse with different backgrounds and experiences. This means that each team member will have their individual strengths that can be an asset to your business. It’s important that you take the time to recognize each one of your team members strengths because this will essentially strengthen the core of your business and allow for better productivity.

3. Identify negative attributes: No team is perfect, and because of this you have to pay attention to negative attributes that can potentially harm your business’s success. Some of these attributes include:

• inability to work as a team
• unwilling to grow and change
• unable to come to an agreement on important issues

Negative attributes can hinder your business’s growth. Keeping an eye open for these types of characteristics will help you to diffuse problems before they become too big to handle

4 )Age Matters

It’s important to have a range of ages in each team. Having a group of 20 somethings with only one person in their late thirties can mean that the challenges faced by the group could be dealt with a very one-sided approach. We’re not ageist here, so this means that the same is likely to happen if you have an older team and only a few young bloods in it. Getting a good age set will also mean you’ll have a balance of knowledge, experience and the fearlessness that comes with youth.

5 ) A Balance in Skill Set

Age is not the only determiner of experience. Some people may have worked across several roles making them great multi-taskers while others may have specialised in one specific area making them your subject matter expert. So when compiling your team always get a good mix of skill set, have senior, mid and junior developers work together. I would also recommend that you remain cognisant of that old epithet that says “too many cooks spoil the broth” so be sure that you have a maximum of 2–3 seniors in the group and then fill the rest of the team with mid and junior humans.