Teamwork is part of the professional routine of most people and, from experience, I can say that it is not always easy. On the contrary! It’s a huge challenge finding a group of people who can really work as a team!
If you are interested in this article, it is likely that you´ll be part of, or have participated in many groups and, I imagine, in few of them you felt in a real team… Am I right?
The problem is that the difference of being part of a group of professionals with an excellent teamwork to another who can´t perform a good job working together is huge for both the organization and you.
Effectiveness, efficiency, more easiness of achieving great results, quality of worklife, motivation, achievement, success, all improve or become easier if teamwork flows well. If it doesn´t flow well, however, the results are much worse.
Thus, whether you are the leader or a member of this kind of group, learning what can transform people into a real team is a fundamental and most important skill for your professional success. In fact, few people know how to do this well and I would say that if you succeed, you will surely stand out in your organization.
Thinking about this, I decided to write two articles. Today’s text is focused on your leadership role. The goal is to bring some tips and promote some thoughts so that you can improve the quality of the teamwork of the groups you are leading. The second text, titled “How to Become a Great Team Member“, focuses on the team member. That is, if you are not the leader, but you work in a team, you will see how you can collaborate with your colleagues and help the group move forward.
These goals should be clear, challenging, and should arouse genuine interest and motivation among all the people involved. The goal here is to find something that unites the group. Something that everyone agrees, that is relevant and that they have a lot of interest in seeing it happen. It should be something that connects the result of the team´s total effort with the individual motivation of each one.
From experience, I can say that it´s not always easy to find a common goal, but at the same time, not finding one is a problem to make a team really work. In the times when I failed to build a real team, it was mostly because of not being able to define a real and sincere common goal that brought the whole team together.
Thanking subordinate for a job well done (Photo: PeopleImages / iStock)
The various members, or sub-teams, will always contribute to the final result. Identify, value and demonstrate that to them, for the team to succeed, it is necessary that each one of them does his job well.
To favor or devalue certain members for doing less critical or less important activities is a shot in the foot and a fast way to promote the breakup of the team.
It is the leader’s responsibility to create the necessary environment for teamwork. You have to put a lot of energy into making people feel good so that confidence can be felt, after all, most people have negative experiences they already bring from other groups they have participated in.
If you can create this environment, the team will take calculated risks, communicate clearly and openly, bring more innovative solutions and begin to develop a very efficient dynamic between them.
Until that happens, however, the group will fall far short of its true potential.
The advantage of having a group of people is that you can bring a good diversity of thoughts, points of view and skills. When well exploited, these differences will foster creativity, innovation and spontaneous contributions. The more diverse, however, the more difficult the communication and the greater the chances of disagreements.
Promote empathy among team members and invest time to ensure inclusion of these different ideas and opinions. People need to realize how positive it is to have people who specialize in other matters and more appropriate to deal with certain situations than themselves. Who gains with this is the team as a whole (and each one individually too!).
Most important, however, is to remember that only bringing diversity does not help. The bulk of your energy will be in ensuring that this diversity is included. Only then will the team really benefit!
Define what can and what cannot be done; how conflicts will be resolved, etc. It is necessary to have a set of rules that will help the positive dynamics of the team and deal well with conflicts and disagreements – which will certainly come around.
Again, the responsibility to define and set an example is yours, but this is an activity that must be built together, and people should make their contributions. Meetings and alignments are also excellent occasions to clear up noises in communication and give more clarity to what is understood as valid, or not, for that team.
Receiving an award at work (Photo: Wavebreakmedia / iStock)
The goal here is threefold:
Allow members to become responsible for a big bulk of the work and give feedback about it. Besides being great for teamwork, it’s a great motivator for people. They understand that they are valued and, as a result, this reduces the weight of your back.
In the beginning, you´ll notice that you´re in the center of decision-making. And this is normal, after all the group is still being formed and needs your personal energy to become a team! In time, however, and as trust builds, try to encourage the team to make their own decisions. Stay more as a facilitator of the discussion and see what happens.
This is a difficult phase, after all, you will be preparing the team to “no longer need you”. However, at the same time, it is very important. I have seen many groups whose development stopped exactly because their leader could not let the team act alone.
The ultimate goal here is for you to prepare the team and gradually become “irrelevant” to good group decision making. Curiously, when that happens, it’s one of the clear signals that your group has actually turned into a team.
Make sure that the team has the material and financial resources to work, broad access to the information needed to carry out its functions, training and opportunities available in order to develop.
It may seem like the basics, but often, mere carelessness with these factors ends up hampering the development of good teamwork. Make sure they are present on a day-to-day basis and the team will work in peace and without disadvantages.
Create opportunities where the team can evaluate their progress together, if you give feedback, identify what needs improvement, where achievements can be shared and successes celebrated. These are moments that help to give cohesion to the team and create esprit de corps.
It could be a happy hour, for example, or an informal meeting outside of the work environment. These moments are very important for people to get to know each other, to interact in more relaxed conditions and to exchange professional and personal experiences.
The ten tips above, as well as being based much on my personal experience, are a synthesis of what is common in different studies of teamwork.
If you want to go deeper, my suggestion is the study of the works of the psychology professor J. Richard Hackman. One of the pioneers in studying the dynamics of teams within organizational contexts, he wrote a few books. Among them, one of my favorites is “Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances“. A little of the insights that the book brings are contained in the above tips.
Cover photo credit – Boss congratulating team player (Photo: PeopleImages / iStock)
