Freight factoring can involve multiple players from a team. Supporting this type of factoring may take your sales team, your account receivables team, your shipping and receiving team, and your support team. As cut and dry as this arrangement seems, Advanced Funds Network (AFN) would like to ask one question: what happens if there's no team to count on?

Odd as it may seem, there are businesses that struggle to produce cohesion and effective teamwork. When you think about it, bringing together a group of individuals with different skill sets and personalities is difficult enough. Then you have to get them to work together toward a common goal. It doesn't take long to realize that you have a Herculean task on your hands.

It's time to call on technical reinforcements.

Five Threads, One Team

There is no formula or secret ingredient to successful teamwork; however, there are five common threads savvy managers use to construct successful teams.

1.    Adjust your expectations to complement individuality. Team building relies on identifying and utilizing individual strengths, not focusing on deficiencies.

Too often, business owners expect their staff members to be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. The truth is, it's a rare employee that is able to improve on a deficiency. A better strategy is to evaluate their job performance based on all of their duties. The weaknesses you find along the way can be strengthened through skill-related partnerships with other employees.

2.    Work things out together. Conflicts and disagreements are part of a normal working environment. The best resolution to an argument is not to get in the middle of it. Rather, facilitate a conversation between the employees involved. Once you bring them together, let them work things out. As they learn about this new dynamic of conflict resolution, they'll start to initiate it on their own without prompting from you.

3.    Set operational expectations. You have to clue your employees in on your management style. Whether that's collective problem-solving with full participation from staff or an independent top-down approach where everyone has a specified role, your employees need to know how you operate if you want them to follow suit.

4.    Watch their six. Confident decision-makers come from well-supported teams. That support needs to extend to any in-office issues that arise, including removing obstacles for your staff. Your support allows them to move forward with confidence.

5.    Create varying incentives. Bonuses are one way to recognize that a goal has been met, but that is not your only option. Consider using days off, special events, competitions, and gift cards as the benchmark for goals. This point revisits the original fact that everyone is different and responds differently to rewards.

Just like every person is unique, every business is also unique. Freight factoring is just one of the options we offer our clients. To find out more about freight factoring, contact us through our website. While you're there, make sure to tell us how these threads are creating close-knit teams in your business.