Managers of all sorts are charged with building teams that win. To you, as a pharmaceutical sales manager, winning means gaining sales and market share for your product. You know you can't do it alone. You need your team to work together to achieve this goal.

Effective teams have at least four specific characteristics. Their members:

• Understand the overall goals of the team.
• Have clear roles and responsibilities.
• Communicate openly and effectively with each other.
• Trust, respect and support each other.

And, last but not least, effective teams have effective leaders ... and that means you.

Before you can begin to build an effective team, you need to assess and perfect your leadership skills. Without a good leader, your team will fail to reach its true potential.

Do you set and maintain high standards? Do you demonstrate respect and support for the people you supervise? These behaviors are necessary to effectively lead your team to success. Work on encouraging and listening to your people. They are the ones out in the field. Their input can be invaluable when it comes to addressing real, as opposed to perceived, needs in the marketplace. Communicate with your people freely both up and down the chain of command. Within reason, challenge upper management to think outside the box. Try not to break under pressure; take the wheel when your people need direction, and never, ever pass the buck or the blame. It will always come back to haunt you.

None of these tips is news to you. But we all can sometimes forget and lapse into less-than-productive ways. Remind yourself what a good leader you can be, check in with yourself periodically, and make sure you are not turning into that boss you weren't so crazy about at your last job.

Once you've honed your leadership skills, you can start thinking about moving your team forward.

Effective team-building

We just looked at four characteristics of effective teams. It is your job to ensure that your team members embody these characteristics. Some are easier than others.

Team goals. Once you have defined the goals of the team, ensuring that your team members understand these goals is a fairly straightforward task. One of the best ways to ensure understanding is to write them down and talk about them. These goals can be quantitative, such as "increase market share to 56% by October 1," or qualitative, such as "become a valued clinical resource to specialists across the region."

Team-building tip: Define some of your own goals for the team, and then when you discuss them with your team members, ask for input on those goals as well as suggestions for additional goals. Agree on appropriate changes, revise the list and distribute hard copies to all members of the team. This helps ensure that the team's goals are documented and that you have achieved initial buy-in from team members.

Member roles and responsibilities. Defining member roles and responsibilities is also a fairly straightforward task. You probably supervise several representatives, each of whom is charged with selling your product within a particular territory. As in defining team goals, it helps if you provide an initial list of roles and responsibilities that your representatives can respond to. Again, make appropriate changes based on each representative's input.