How effective is your team?
How effective is your team? Equally important, how much value do you place on team effectiveness? It’s a question worth asking, because the answer could determine the difference between thriving organisations and those that are, well, the opposite.
Some of us still get shivers at the thought of university group assignments; the very concept of them is fraught. On the flipside, there’s no denying that the ability to collaborate effectively is an essential skill and/or quality in a contemporary workforce. However, in our experience, many organisations and businesses don’t seem to spend enough time thinking about the importance of effective teams, let alone actively working on how to improve the way people and teams work together.
Effective teamwork simply yields better results. How can it not? When the alchemy of different skills, knowledge, experience and perspectives is pitched against a challenge, the creative, multifaceted outcomes offer a smorgasbord of options, resulting in clever solutions that drive a business’ success.
Other than the bottom line of productivity and efficiency, effective teams impact on culture. People are more engaged and connected within effective teams and this results in increased presenteeism and, yes, greater productivity.
There is so much value that’s lost in ineffective teamwork and dysfunctional team dynamics. By ‘team’ it could be the literal definition of a team, a group of people engaged to execute a function, or it may be individuals who need to collaborate closely, such as the executive team. And what about teams joining forces to become a larger team, such as sales and marketing. Very few of us haven’t experienced that undercurrent of tension when witnessing team or cross-team dysfunction. How can people do their best work when there’s a constant state of loggerheads? It’s an energy sucker and a productivity killer.
A framework that we find incredibly useful in this concept of team dynamics is Lencionio’s Five Functions of a Team model. The subject of his NY Times bestseller, it shares the five functions that effective teams deploy in a pyramid structure:
Results
Accountability
Commitment
Conflict
Trust
There are also the converse dysfunctions of a team, but what we like about this model is its accessibility and relevance to all types, levels and sizes of teams.
At People and Growth Consulting, we work with clients to improve their team effectiveness as part of our bespoke, tailored approach to helping clients create thriving, people-focused workplaces. We do so in a range of different services, from consulting, change management, transformation and HR leadership. Another service we offer is individual and team effectiveness workshops. This is where we use different assessment tools (again, tailored to the needs of the client), to help them build awareness and appreciation of the dynamics of the team.
Awareness is a key word here. Beyond the team, individuals need an awareness of themselves and their working style. They need to know their preferences, as well as an awareness of and respect for alternative styles and preferences. Knowing what they bring to the team is as important as knowing what others do too. When people build their self-awareness, they can have a deeper understanding of why they work in a particular way. This allows them to move from a mindset of judging others’ ways of working (often as a negative, which adds to an underlying conflict) to appreciating and leveraging different strengths and preferences.
A powerful way to build this awareness and appreciation is to use profiling tools such as DiSC or CliftonStrengths by Gallup. These tools explore working styles and preferences. They provide deep insights into the individual, but also they create a shared vocabulary and framework that articulates and defines how the team works together.
Teamwork is essential to a thriving workplace culture and to a business’s bottom line. Why don’t we have a conversation about how we can help you build effective teams?