The Tool You Need for Building a Winning Team
The formula for building a winning team is pretty much the same, no matter your field of play. On the football field or in the office, teams need a mix of strong technical skills and excellent soft skills (like good communication and solid decision making) in order to drive results.Cultivating a team like this — with the fundamentals necessary to perform at a high caliber in every situation — requires maintaining a high-level view of team performance and individual skills. As a leader, it’s crucially important that you understand the capacity of your team to perform effectively. This means knowing where your team members shine, where there are gaps, and where there are opportunities to grow individual and collective knowledge and skills in order to increase the team’s performance capacity.Here at Success Labs, we use the Team Capacity Matrix to track important fundamentals in key skill and functional areas.
Download the Free Success Labs Team Capacity Matrix Here
3 Benefits of Using the Success Labs Team Capacity Matrix
The Team Capacity Matrix functions like a full-spectrum team map, marked with a legend that shows pitfalls and opportunities at a glance. If used correctly, it’s a powerful tool for ensuring that your team will always be prepared to meet both current and future strategic objectives.
The Matrix supports and boosts your people strategy by greatly enhancing your ability to cross-train, anticipate talent/skill loss, make strategic hires, and raise the effectiveness of your team at a time when the business environment is incredibly complex and volatile.
By tracking your employees’ skill level in areas that are critical to your business, your organization will be more agile and resilient in times of upheaval. External challenges like market volatility, labor shortages, and weather events hurt less when you are continually aware of and investing in needed skills.
If someone in a key role is promoted or quits, you know at a glance where they will leave a gap. This allows you to be proactive in planning and developing your team, instead of reacting to skill gaps after they are exposed.
How To Use the Team Capacity Matrix
First, it’s important to know your organization’s strategic objectives, as well as your overall challenge and opportunity areas, in order to get a realistic picture of your team capacity when it comes to meeting those objectives.
Be aware of People Risks, such as having too many experts corralled in a particular Knowledge Silo, or too many novices in another. An accumulation of People Risks opens your organization up to unsafe or ineffective practices, talent shortages when people leave, and potential imbalance in capacity across the organization.
Be future-oriented in your perspective. What are areas of potential growth for your team or organization? Can you start to cultivate capacity in areas that aren’t in your current strategic plan… but might be in the future?
Building a high-functioning, resilient team happens through intention, planning, and investment. Our Team Capacity Matrix is designed to make the process easier and more intuitive, as you tackle the job of helping your team be effective in rising to any challenge or opportunity that comes its way. We encourage you to reach out to us if you have any questions about using it in your organization. Our consultants are here to support you as you build your winning team!
Download the Free Success Labs Team Capacity Matrix Here
Success Labs is a leadership development and management consulting firm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to grow leaders, build teams and drive results through great people strategy. Contact us to get proactive about expanding your company’s potential, and stay up-to-date with our latest news and leadership development updates here.
