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Strength in Numbers

Dec 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Bob Mitchell, Integrated Management Group

Many contractors have mentoring programs for new team members that help them through this stage. For example, Total Electric has developed formal mentoring programs for apprentices to help them understand team goals and those of the organization as a whole. Informal mentoring programs for the more experienced journeyman electrician will help them understand the roles of existing team members and how they can best contribute to a successful project.

Norming, the third stage of team building, is the time when turbulence fades away. Conflict is reduced, and team members learn to accept their differences in hopes of working collaboratively. By accepting their role on the team, employees finally understand their responsibility to the group.

During this stage, you'll notice more members becoming active listeners. With the group identity at a high, the team remains more open-minded, as participants start taking responsibility for their actions. More friendliness and sharing of personal problems become constructive rather than destructive. Because all team members know the ground rules and accept them, the group is able to establish stability over its processes and perceive it is making headway.

The final stage of team building, performing, is when all members take full responsibility for the group's process and outcomes. Members know the strengths and weaknesses of their counterparts and accept them. They share leadership and responsibility for their performance and are now able to use group problem-solving and decision-making methods more effectively.

In this stage, your team will perform at a very high level. Members will be creative and handle conflict in a constructive manner. With morale up, members will look forward to going to work. They will typically make decisions by consensus and put the team before themselves.

A solid foundation

Once your team has gone through each of these stages, productivity will increase, absenteeism and tardiness will decrease, morale will improve, and the ability to work with other trades will be easier to manage. However, no matter how successful the team, the process of team building is never really over for the supervisor. Before you know it, many factors can cause your team to go from a well-oiled machine back to the stage of storming.

Among many other influences, adding new members may cause the team to slip backward. Because members accept the way things are, they may resist the change that can accompany defining a new team member's role or restructuring of their own role. The same goes for losing team members.

On electrical construction sites, manpower requirements constantly change throughout the life of the project. As a result, it's difficult, if not impossible, to keep the same team together on a project from start to finish. That's why it's so important for supervisors to react proactively to prevent the team from falling apart when issues arise.

By building high-performance teams, an electrical contracting firm will reap many benefits, not the least of which is making the project more profitable. The job will also become safer and more productive, resulting in less employee turnover, absenteeism, and tardiness. Possibly the largest benefit of having an effective team, however, is your company's reputation.

Seeing the performance of your crew, other subcontractors will either go out of their way to work with you or will stay away from projects you are on altogether. After the project is finished, end-users will also be more inclined to use your services again if they've seen effective teamwork in action. Only as good as their subcontractors on a project, general contractors will not only keep you on their bid list, but they'll also actively use your services on as many projects as possible.

Because becoming an effective team builder is something that takes time and practice, getting the necessary training to enhance team building skills is an investment electrical contractors can't afford to ignore. Although the commitment is significant, the investment will pay for itself many times over through successful projects, repeat business, lower employee turnover, and higher profits.

Mitchell is president of Integrated Management Group in St. Louis. He can be reached at bob.mitchell@img-training.com.

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