12 Ways to Maintain Highly Functional Teams

In these next couple of blogs we will chat about how to maintain highly functional and healthy teams. After a great team is built—it needs continued care and maintenance. (In case you missed it, you may want to check out our earlier post “12 Steps to Creating Great Volunteer Teams.”)

Just as a garden needs tending, so do teams. Even if we started well, understood the dynamics and made good choices, human nature can often take us down a slippery slope. This can happen quite quickly when projects start to go south due to some external issue. Or when one bad apple enters the fray. We need to be vigilant in our tending, i.e., our day in and day out attitude and active management.

Thus, just as building a great team is essential to fostering success in your organization, you must also learn to maintain that team. In this blog, we will provide you with a list of actions we believe everyone needs to undertake to maintain healthy and productive teams. Recall that you and your teammates are volunteers, not permanent, paid employees. Healthy teams can win quickly, but unhealthy teams can also lose quickly because folks will not stick around long if they are participating on poorly managed, losing teams. Volunteers will be quicker to walk away, so preparing and maintaining the foundation of health is vital.

We want you to think about the guidelines below. We examine 10 in this blog and another 10 in the next. Each guideline comes with a responsibility to be a good team member and/or team manager. Work and practice hard at being a good teammate no matter where you are in the organization. Your effort will be contagious. At the end of the day, all we really have is each other. Tasks come and go and they change based on the external environment. Some of the tasks will be less enjoyable than others. Sometimes, it feels as if we are merely moving the pile of dirt from one side of the field to the other and back again. Nevertheless, if we are moving that dirt with a good bunch of teammates, the dirt becomes less important and the time you spend with the folks running the hand shovel or the backhoe can be very enjoyable.

Put these guidelines to work for you. Change the wording to best suit your organization. Print them on a poster and hang it in a visible, high traffic area where all of your volunteers can see and read this list daily. Make them your own. The point is to actively use them. Humans need reminders, so devise a soft managerial way to do this reminding.

Do all of these things and you will not have to worry as much about motivation, honesty, fairness, and the pop culture of the day’s teamwork lessons. It will all come along nicely, and most projects will be successful. You will have many winning seasons, and take home a few championships along the way.

For more inspiration on how to create and maintain great teams, download the free eBook, Volunteering.

Karl’s volunteer management experience spans three decades. He recently retired as a chief strategy officer, after having implemented the strategic plan of a 1500+ employee service sector organization.  He is now a principal with Sunshine Valley Communications, www.sunshinevalley.org. He has taught courses in management, business and economics, operations research, and project management. He holds degrees in engineering and economics and is near completion of a second book on the management of highly competitive environments. Recently he has provided strategic planning, project management and technical assistance to numerous volunteer organizations and communities and has written extensively on the subject. Karl resides in the Missouri Ozarks and can be reached at kburgher@SunshineValley.org.