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It’s simple. Focusing on team building leads to enhanced performance. The most productive and affirmative teams do not take their relationships or their culture for granted, but rather build them consciously. Team members build their own skills and offer them in support of each other. Team leaders and managers model and promote good team behaviors to help get the most out of the teams they lead. Most organizations consider teamwork skills when evaluating employees or considering them for promotions.
To improve collaboration and performance, teams must:
One of the most indispensable skill sets for individuals and team leads is communication. Failures here can decrease creativity, decrease productivity, impair culture, cause deadlines to be missed, and more.
Trust is a central part of all human relationships, including among team members. Good communication skills can build trust. Through clear, timely, and respectful communication, the rest of the team learns that we can be trusted to follow through on our commitments. Through admitting our mistakes, they learn that we’re willing to take responsibility.
In Patrick Lencioni’s model of teams, trust is the foundation upon which cohesion is built. Trust is also a component of Amy Edmundson’s concept of psychological safety—a strong predictor of team effectiveness. Trust is about the beliefs we have about another person. Psychological safety is more focused on how you think others on the team perceive you. Both trust and safety must be high to ensure that teams are more likely to share ideas, reveal and discuss mistakes, ask for and receive feedback, take reasonable risks, and confront work-life issues.
Effective teams possess a high degree of interdependence—members must rely upon each other to achieve collective results. Members who understand what is expected of them and others, and who know that they can depend upon their teammates, will perform better and enjoy themselves more while working. They will be more committed to the team and find it easier to accept both personal responsibilities and shared accountability for results.
Great teams aren’t devoid of conflict. They are willing to address it and sometimes even seek it out. They understand that conflict can be productive.
Teams can discuss how they have handled conflicts in the past and how they want to handle conflicts in the future. Having this discussion outside a real conflict can provide guidance around expected behaviors and reassurance that conflict is normal. It makes it less likely that poor behavior during conflict will be accepted. It makes it more likely that real solutions will be found.
On healthy teams, members express their differing opinions in order to reach the best solution. Although team members disagree, everyone’s ideas can be heard and respected. Consensus isn’t always necessary, but getting multiple perspectives is.
Sometimes productive conflict doesn’t feel like conflict; it feels like surfacing the best idea or best action. A high level of trust and psychological safety make it more likely that conflict will be seen in this way.
Team members who have good communication skills, high levels of self-awareness, and high emotional intelligence will find it easier to engage in productive conflict. They are also less likely to allow destructive conflicts to linger or to remain on the team if they aren’t addressed.
Teamwork was the skill 32 percent of employers chose as most important to them in Robert Half’s research for their 2023 Salary Guide. Many of us are watching companies like Dropbox and Atlassian with their “Team Anywhere” and “virtual first” approaches to work. We’ve learned that remote collaboration requires more than working technologies.