You've got to be a leader. Putting together and keeping an effective team can be hard. Here are some ways to start and improve along the way!

Building Your Team

1. Define your purpose. Identify key members of your team and know what their expectations for success are. Have a solid understanding of what you are trying to accomplish as a team.
2. Determine the role of each member. Take an honest look at each team member's strengths and weaknesses in order to best assign roles and responsibilities.
3. Have a plan for resources. Create resource allocation plans centered around your team goals and figure out what you need to accomplish this.
4. Determine the size of your team. Think about the number of team members needed to accomplish each goal and keep the size of the team manageable.
5. Manage your team. Create mechanisms to manage team momentum, members' commitment, and other outside active support, through continual relationship building.
6. Know your team. Think about your team members individual and collective: reputation, networking relationships, ability to bring in resources, and their expertise. They have resources to offer.
7. Define your image. Think about the goals of your project and determine what it is that your team wants to be known for, and who is the audience you want to reach? You must know your target audience.
8. Create and manage plans. How will you communicate with each other and outside groups, how will you trust each other and solve issues that arise? You need plans or a structure for making group decisions.
9. Inform your team. The team will be prepared to act for the advancement of the group if they know the stages of team-building: forming, storming, norming, and performing.
10. Know yourself, your abilities and limitations. A core component of successful leadership is emotional intelligence, which includes Self Awareness, Self-regulation, Motivation, Empathy and Social Skills.
11. Use the whole team's resources. Network, Network, Network! This will help you get yourself and your group into the community and more involved.