Everyone has experienced teams that worked nearly perfectly . . . and teams that failed. Unfortunately, it's often difficult to understand how a team succeeds or fails from the inside, because individual members can be very invested in their own perspectives over a global understanding of what happened to the team as a whole. The Xpeerience Group (http://www.xpeeriencegroup.com) is a team development organization that specializes in making teams more creative and productive, and has identified the following four challenges that virtually every team faces in the process of accomplishing its goals.



Clear Goals: Teams needs properly defined goals. Many organizations leave this to managers, but if a supervisor selects a goal that is unrealistic, vague or ill-suited to the team this can cause problems from the outset. This management style can also create a feedback loop between team members and the supervisor, where a cycle of questions and small, clarifying decisions stalls progress. This is why even under strong supervision, teams need the ability to clarify and describe their goals in a way they can effectively act on. In organizations where teams have a general responsibility or mission statement, this is even more important, because the team needs to create set goals based on loose or distant guidance. No matter the reason for setting them, goals need to be attainable within the team's time, resource and competence limits, and need to be defined with enough precision that the team can identify the criteria for meeting the goal and thus, what they need to do to get there.

Dividing Labor and Harnessing Talent: A clear goal inherent recommends a plan of action, and triggers the challenge of dividing responsibilities to work within the plan. In some groups, this is a simple step. Professional sports teams have well-defined divisions of labor. Successful soccer teams know who their forwards and fullbacks are. This is possible because in soccer, the goal (scoring, and preventing goals against your team) is well-defined, the team knows what skill sets are required to achieve  it and picks the best people for those jobs. Management intelligence is vital; the supervisor or team leader needs to have an unbiased view of each member's strengths and weaknesses.

However, just as in soccer, where forwards are stars, some team roles seem more prestigious than others. Reinforcing how each role is vital to the team's success in both planning and presentation/adjournment ensures that every team member not only knows his or her role is vital during implementation, but at the end stage, when self-assessment and management review provide social (and material) rewards for performance.

Knowing When to Stop: Overplanning and redundant actions can destroy a team's momentum. The key to prevent this is to not only have a well-defined goal, but equally firm intermediate steps. For example, if a team is working on a large document, the cycle between writers and editors can turn into a closed loop, running through revision after revision, as both sides simply have the vague agenda of making it ?better.? Instead, the team should have a finite goal (remove all errors) and a set number of steps to improve quality (such as a cap of two or three revisions to improve quality).

Learning Effectively: An ideal team not only does the job in front of them well, but uses it to improve future projects. Every team needs to engage in self-assessment at the project's conclusion. This can be a problem is the project didn't go well, but in those cases, this kind of debriefing is even more important so that the team can salvage something of value even from a failure. That's why it's important to focus this stage on the group instead of the failings of specific individuals (this should be dealt with in a more intimate setting than a team meeting). Make sure that successes are shared, but also described in specific, factual terms, so that they represent information that team members can use to do even better in the future.

One of the best ways to get better at meeting these four challenges is through the kind of team building activities that the Xpeerience group holds for professionals. Through sports, games, scenarios and adventure travel challenges, teams learn to meet their goals in a safe environment, using skills they can apply when their organizations? success is on the line.