In the fast-paced world of business, a cohesive team that pulls together is essential for success. However, it’s not uncommon for teams to experience periods where they’re not firing on all cylinders, or pulling together, struggling to sing from the same hymn sheet or any other euphemism you may like, for not working together well. If your team is facing such challenges, this blog is for you.
There are lots of proven strategies out there, to help you refocus your team on collaborative success. Here are some of our favourites, because we have experience of them working really well. They focus on trust, accountability, and sharing a common purpose.
Cultivate Trust Within the Team: The Bedrock of Collaboration
Trust is the cornerstone of any successful team. Without trust, communication breaks down, collaboration splinters, and the team’s overall performance suffers. To rebuild trust within your team, you may like to try these strategies:
Open and Transparent Communication:
- Encourage open and honest communication within the team. Establish a culture where team members feel comfortable expressing their ideas, concerns, and feedback. Regular team meetings, both formal and informal, can provide a platform for transparent discussions. A “No Surprises” culture can also help – encouraging the sharing of bad news early, along with the freedom to fail (so long as your team learns) will build a strong bond of shared trust and unspoken reliability.
Lead by Example:
- Leadership plays a pivotal role in fostering trust. Leaders should lead by example in this regard. How? By demonstrating integrity, reliability, and transparency. When team members witness these qualities in their leaders, it sets a positive tone for the entire team. It also sets a level of mutual expectation – everyone is expected to behave decently to their colleagues, to keep their word and to be honest and open in their dealings with others. Open means not hiding important details; it does not mean bogging your colleagues down with minutiae which clog the team’s effectiveness.
Team-building Activities beyond the spaghetti and marshmallows
- When you read “team-building”, does your heart sink, or your eyes roll? It’s such a hackneyed term isn’t it? Bitter memories of faffing about with people you don’t know (or don’t like – or both!) in the rain to make you all work together magically often come to mind. Don’t worry – that’s not what we’re talking about here! We recommend working on how to build trust-based bonds between your team members, using exercises that are based in the team’s strengths. How to find out their strengths? We use a range of profiling tools. You can use what you like, but focusing on strengths uses positive psychology to support people to build bonds from a good place. That creates a real camaraderie – and that’s what you need to get you through the tough times (or to get people to work together as you know they can).
Instil Accountability: Empowering Individuals for Collective Success
Accountability is the glue that holds a team together. When each team member takes ownership of their responsibilities and is accountable for their actions, the entire team benefits. If you are wondering whether you have this, ask whether you have a blame culture. If you do, that’s a lack of accountability! Here are some actionable steps to change that:
Clearly Defined Roles and Expectations:
- Ambiguity regarding roles and expectations can lead to confusion and frustration. Clearly define each team member’s role and responsibilities, ensuring that everyone understands how their contributions align with the team’s goals. Wherever you can, agree this first with the team member, rather than impose it on them (if that feels difficult, re-read the first section on trust, above).
Regular Check-ins and Feedback:
- Establish a system of regular check-ins and feedback sessions. These can provide opportunities to discuss progress, address challenges, and celebrate achievements. Constructive feedback should be a two-way street, with team members feeling comfortable providing input as well as receiving it. Again, the “no surprises” rule applies here, with no Big News kept waiting for annual appraisals. That’s secrecy (re-read the first section again!) and can be toxic.
Goal Setting and Milestones:
- Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound, exciting and recorded (SMARTER) goals for the team. Break down larger objectives into smaller milestones, allowing for a sense of accomplishment from team members along the way. This can also help if your team are feeling overwhelmed – “chunking down” into small work packages that can be achieved can be transformative when they are faced with a raft of KPIs and don’t know where to start. Celebrating these achievements reinforces the team’s commitment to accountability.
Define and Communicate a Shared Purpose
Uniting the team towards a common goal is a powerful motivator that can really bring individuals together to make a team. It also has the potential to be powerful, to remind a team why they do what they do, together. When team members understand and believe in the purpose of their work, collaboration becomes more natural. Here’s some ideas for how to engender and communicate that shared purpose:
Craft a Compelling Mission Statement:
- You could refocus your team, by having them develop a mission statement that encapsulates their purpose and values. This statement should inspire and resonate with each team member, fostering a sense of pride and commitment to the collective mission. It should also remind them of what works, what they are best at and what they enjoy.
Align Individual Goals with the Team’s Purpose:
- We would always recommend that your team members can see a clear connection between their individual contributions and the overarching purpose of the team. When individuals understand how their work contributes to the bigger picture, they are more likely to feel motivated and engaged. So when you’re having feedback or goal-setting conversations, revisiting this can be really powerful.
Regularly Reinforce the Shared Purpose:
- Messages in corporate communication work best with repetition and reinforcement. So if you can integrate the team’s purpose into your regular communication channels, that is another useful way to reinforce that sense of collective endeavour. Whether it’s during team meetings, in project updates, or through more widespread internal communications, consistently reinforcing the shared purpose keeps it front-and-centre for everyone.
So, in the end, taking a team that’s not firing on all cylinders and turning it around takes work. More than that, it takes planning and intentional action. By keeping your focus on trust, accountability and that all-important shared purpose, you create a framework for improvement. You can choose to give our tried-and-tested approaches or you can go your own way. Either way, clear and open communication, together with a supportive approach that encourages your teams to re-discover their A-game, will be crucial to your team rebuilding their resilience.
If this sounds like something you need, but you’d like to talk it over, we would be delighted to chat with you. Please contact us to book a confidential conversation, to explore how to get your team pulling together once again.
Image credit: Yan Krukau: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-white-dress-shirt-covering-his-face-7640484/