Three Steps to Highly Effective Team Collaboration
A few years ago, I was approach by a Director of a mid-sized company to do some work with her team. She initially asked me if I could help her team of 14 work more effectively together. While she talked about their great working environment, she admitted that morale and productivity were starting to decline. One of her most pressing concerns was that three key members of her group had recently left the organization.
I asked her what she wanted to see more of in her department. “Well, collaboration is one of our core values. I want to see more evidence of that on a daily basis”.
I inquired if she had any information from team conversations, performance reviews or exit interviews that might give us a deeper sense of what was happening.
“Oh, yes”, she exclaimed, “we are getting fairly consistent feedback that team members don’t feel appreciated by their peers both within and outside the group. As a management team, we need to fix this problem”.
She explained that last year they had planned an event to showcase their work for other departments within their organization. A planning committee was assembled and they quickly went to work designing the event.
The Director became even more concerned when two team members asked to step down from the assignment.
I asked her what she thought of the event. She admitted that it didn’t feel as cohesive as it could have and the team didn’t seem overly enthusiastic during the event. She seemed genuinely surprised by this given how collaborative the team had been previously.
She had touched on something important.
I probed a bit more about how she defined collaboration. She responded that her organization defined collaboration as employees working together as partners to reach shared goals all within a relatively flat organizational structure.
I asked if team members had a clear understanding of their specific roles and responsibilities within this collaborative model. “We leave our employees to make decisions within their teams and we have confidence that the team will bring their best ideas to the table and bring innovative services to our clients,” the Director explained.
Employees need to have individual accountabilities and specific goals to achieve; this is what drives purpose. Without this framework, employees will feel like the proverbial cog in the wheel, trust starts to erode as toes get stepped on and conflict starts to brew.
These are some of the reasons that employee disengagement can occur even in highly collaborative environments. Symptoms of disengagement amongst employees can include declining levels of enthusiasm, a lower sense of urgency around work priorities, less willingness to engage in work outside of core hours, referred to as discretionary work and unresolved conflict.
With the speed of business today, it’s not easy for managers to keep their finger on this pulse. While it is admirable to allow teams to be self-directed, its merits are sometimes counterproductive. It’s demotivating for team contributors when they aren’t clear how their unique work fits in with the larger purpose of the organization. Fortunately, this can be easily resolved.
Here are three suggestions for facilitating effective teamwork in collaborative environments:
- Bring your team together and openly discuss what they think could be done to improve collaboration. Feel free to circulate this blog post to spark conversation.
- Clearly define core roles and responsibilities for individual team members. Ensure that these roles and responsibilities are in alignment with the overall objectives of the department and your organization. Working with team members’ inherent strengths and developmental interests are key to creating full engagement.
- Encourage your team to create a “ways-of-working” document that describes how they plan to communicate with each other during and between meetings. Perhaps more importantly, invite your team to plan how they will positively manage conflict when it surfaces.
