3 Keys for Better Team-Building and More Collaborative Team Leadership
What do you do when teamwork doesn’t work?
Your organization can’t afford the depletion of energy, the loss of productivity, or the drain on the bottom line. The solution is improving team collaboration — which may seem impossible if your team is struggling.
Collaboration is about accountability and creating an ownership culture. If you want your team to perform better, the members need to take care of it. People take care of what they own.
Effective leadership of collaborative teams requires the team leader to:
- Address what isn’t working.
- View trust as a must-have resource.
- Insist on behaviors that support collaborative principles.
Here’s how to put these team-building and collaboration principles to work.
Leading Collaborative Teams: 3 Tips
First, understand why collaborative teams often don’t work.
The list is long but probably not surprising, including:
- The history of the team.
- Poor relationships.
- Ineffective meetings.
- Little transparency or inadequate sharing of information.
- No team governance processes.
- Conflicting styles of decision-making.
- Behind-the-scenes conversations and processes.
- Competition.
- Turf wars.
- Poor ownership or engagement among team members.
Your team will not be effective or collaborative as long as these are the team dynamics. Take a good look at what’s going on in your team and diagnose what isn’t working.
Better yet, get team members to look at what’s going on and start to think about how true collaboration would replace or resolve their problems. You may want to explore together whether direction, alignment, or commitment could be stronger, and address the area(s) where you’re weakest.
Second, commit to building trust.
Trust is critical for team success and is the foundation of a collaborative team culture throughout an organization.
Many of the reasons that teams don’t work — see above — are tied to lack of trust and psychological safety. Without trust, people operate out of fear.
Trust is the tie that binds — people will subordinate their own self interests for the good of the whole and give team collaboration everything they’ve got. As a result, teams gain productive energy, creativity, speed, and better results.
Bear in mind, however, that trust can’t be trained into a team. It takes a leader who’s willing to show integrity, change behavior, and take on the hard work of collaborating across boundaries and dealing with differences.
Third, operate on agreed-upon collaborative team principles.
Lead a team based on shared principles and values (like accountability, mutual respect, integrity, etc.) rather than structures, politics, or personality.
Your job as a team leader is to help the team turn the team’s values into agreed-upon behaviors, formalizing them by establishing them as team norms, and by setting up a team charter. These become the team’s operating agreements — conscious choices that everyone on the team agrees to. They are the foundation for mutual trust, respect, accountability, and high performance.
When team leaders don’t value and support collaboration, they undermine their teams and sub-optimize performance. In contrast, when teams embrace an effective governance system and leaders commit to a culture of trust and collaboration, the building blocks are in place for success at leading collaborative teams.
What Are the Benefits of Stronger & More Collaborative Teams?
As explained in Transforming the Way We Work: The Power of the Collaborative Workplace by Edward M. Marshall, there are many organizational benefits to team collaboration:
- Organizations collaborate internally to compete externally.
- Decisions are faster, of higher quality, and customer-driven.
- Decisions are made on the basis of principle rather than power or personality, resulting in greater buy-in and impact.
- Cycle time is substantially reduced and non-value-adding work eliminated.
- The productive capacity of the workforce doubles.
- Strategic alliances succeed while building trust and producing extraordinary results.
- Return on investment increases dramatically.
- The span of control increases substantially.
- The workforce takes on full responsibility for the success of the enterprise.
- Conflict is reduced as work relationships open up and build trust.
- The fear is gone — change is seen as a positive opportunity.
All these reasons show the business case for investing in leadership and effective collaborative teams at your organization.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
We can partner with your organization to help you build more collaborative teams with our team development services and solutions.
