Is Your Team Stuck? Try These 4 Game Changing Strategies

It is a concerning statistic that only 5% of employees are responsible for 20-30% of value-added collaborations.

Furthermore, only 50% leaders believe that their teams exceed organisational outcomes (Centre for Creative Leadership 2015).

Sadly, this is no great surprise. For many of us, our experiences of teams and collaborative work has been pretty disappointing. Lack of clarity of direction and accountabilities, poor handling of or avoidance of conflict, lots of simmering ‘unsaids’ all coalesce to create a toxic work environment characterised by low trust, low engagement and mediocre results.

So what can we do about it? Do we just throw our hands up and consider it a fait accompli? Just a fact of working life? Absolutely not.

In my work as a team coach and leadership advisor, I have experienced first-hand the transformations that can take place when teams do the work necessary to make collaboration effective.

The roadmap to achieving this while not easy, is clear.

1. Connect To Meaning

If you want to create teams that are engaged with their work and willing to put in discretionary effort then you had better find out what makes your colleagues tick, what they get excited about, and what turns off their will to live! Loss of connection to meaning and purpose is a significant risk for engagement and the death knell for team performance.

When teams take the time to really understand what makes each person tick individually, and what excites them collectively, intrinsic motivation is unleashed, and work starts to feel less like paying the bills and more like a mission, or even calling, with a greater alignment to who we are as people and what we want to stand for.

This can be achieved through taking the time to understand each other’s strengths as well as less preferred ways of operating. Inviting team members to regularly share stories about their highs and lows at work enables teams to understand what drives its members and is a great way to build greater emotional connection.

Not only does it help to humanise your team – moving from fellow ‘task completers’ to real people with preferences, different drivers and beliefs, it also gives leaders a clear sense of what to safeguard or protect as they make decisions about work allocation and execution. Crafting roles so that people predominantly use their strengths can provide a huge boost for discretionary effort.

2. Learn How To Communicate With Emotional Intelligence

Many teams intend to improve how they communicate – or think they are doing a good enough job at it - but get stuck when the pressure increases.

What I have found to be tremendously impactful is giving people insight into their own communication style through an emotional intelligence assessment tool and then asking people to anticipate and work through and plan for how they might handle more emotional reactions amongst themselves and their colleagues in a way that makes room for different perspectives, demonstrates empathy and allows people to proactively manage their emotional experiences (rather than just be at the behest of them).

The game is well and truly changed when teams learn how to:

• Recognise emotions amongst themselves and their colleagues;

• Understand what might be driving their emotions (at times this is many factors, not the least our physical and mental wellbeing);

• Take active steps around shifting their emotions to operate more productively, given the context;

• Put in place both short term self-management strategies (mindful breathing, taking a break, listening to music to shift states, always clarifying assumptions before launching to conclusions), and longer-term strategies (exercise, rest and nutrition, mindfulness and reflective practices (regular check-ins on how we are behaving as a team, journaling, team and individual coaching).

3. Build Trust and Establish Psychological Safety

Undoubtedly a key factor when teams find themselves in a rut or running over the same conversations and reactionary ways of relating, is a lack trust or psychological safety.

The Google Teams research (Project Aristotle) found that psychological safety - a critical factor in high performing teams - is present when team members are able to take risks and be vulnerable with one another.

The greatest enablers of psychological safety are:

• Having clear structures on who is responsible, how decisions get made, and accountabilities.

• Ensuring that everyone’s voice gets heard – no matter their role or communication style.

• An inclusive, caring leadership style – which role models support and understanding at the same time as holding high standards for quality and effort. (What doesn’t work is a highly evaluative dynamic across the team, where its members constantly feel like they are being assessed and compared against one another).

• The willingness of the leader of the team to be vulnerable – revealing their own insecurities and challenges - which makes room for others to do the same.

• Making decisions in the service of the customer or the organisation (and not themselves or their own career progression – ie. being focused on looking good).

Building a high trust team is an ongoing process that requires committed leadership. It begins with the leader being really clear on what behaviours are required to improve team performance and build trust, and holding themselves and others to account.

Teams that get focused on following through for each other, putting in effort to develop themselves, and making decisions in the service of their shared purpose (not themselves) become the teams that everyone wants to join.

4. Keep Checking For Aligned Action

The reality is, creating a high trust, high performing team is an ongoing process that requires regular reflection, honest conversations, and the willingness to change behaviours in the service of the group.

Once the up-front ground rules of engagement and commitments have been made, teams need to ensure that they continue to check in not only on the quality of their output but the way that they are operating, and whether it aligns to their stated intentions.

Some leaders find this tedious and too self-reflective, preferring to ‘just get on with doing the work and stop talking about it’. They do this at their peril however and soon find that the wheels fall off when everyone gets too busy with ‘doing the work’, overlooking that a key factor in effective collaboration and high performance is the discipline of continuing to reflect on HOW we do our work.

In fact, the most skilful teams learn how to reflect both ON action and IN action – cultivating a kind of ‘meta perspective’ that allows for agility, course correction and productive working relationships over the longer term. (Mindfulness is a key enabler of this perspective taking capacity – to find out more read my post on Mindfulness and Teams.)  

There are many different micro practices and habits that can be learned and embedded in team life that support and cultivate aligned action. Our Team Coaching Program teaches many of these and is designed to move teams from low to high trust and sustained high performance.

We’d love to hear from you if you’d like to find out more.