Mid-Level Managers - A Team Handshake

A mid-level manager handles responsibilities of multiple teams. Joint goals can be achieved by adopting creative strategies such as Teaming the Teams, where team members from multiple teams are put into a new team and asked to work with one another.

The key concepts that managers had applied during the development of their old teams will be equally effective while creating these new, collaborative teams. The creation of such external teams are mostly done to address the needs of the clients, especially in processes where every team needs to give an output of uniform quality. These processes call for equal distribution of expertise, so if a team has two experts in one field, one of them will be put in another team where no such experts are there.

This tactical re-arrangement of the team members is called as Team Handshake. This smart step not only saves the company from hiring additional resources, but also adds to the interpersonal skills of different members of teams, which ultimately leads to the success of that team.

A few factors which mid-level managers should consider before selecting handshake teams −

• The political climate of the climate’s business.
• Identifying the best people for the Relationship Team.
• Identifying the best people for the Transactional Team.
• Whether there is any backup or replacements for the team members.
• The depth of organization and the level up to which the mid-level managers have access.
• Whether they can access certain internal customer discussions on related topics.

When the client’s political environment has been established, mid-level managers should next establish the relational and the transactional teams respectively. They should always keep it in mind that transactional teams cannot be created before the actual beginning of the project.

The reason is that transactional teams don’t have any authorization to take any pre-emptive measures. They can only solve any present problems and diminish the scope of future problems, which means they cannot start identifying issues before the project starts.

Identifying the Core Sectors of a Company

One of the initial steps of declaring team members is to discuss the objective with all the departments involved. The strength of relationship between a team and its clients goes hand in hand with the alignment of the project according to the client’s concern.

The following are some of the core sectors within the company, which the mid-level managers may seek to collaborate with during the implementation of a project.