If you’ve been lucky enough to have tasted what it’s like to be part of a team that just clicks, you’ll know how great it can be.It may have been in school sports, part time work as a student, an artistic group or in your current role.
A team with great teamwork is a joy to be part of and inspires you to be the best version of yourself to keep up.It sets the bar high and supports everyone to meet the challenges in front of them.
Projects need great teamwork – there’s simply no other way to get them done.How a team performs can make all the difference between achieving successful results and costly disappointment.
The more challenging the project, the more innovation required, the more teamwork contributes to its success.
Workplace projects often include people from across a business, who are new to each other and bring different skills and experience and quite possibly have other responsibilities too.
So how do you develop great teamwork in a team who have just met and will only be together for the duration of a project?
The key is to think of teamwork as a learnable leadership capability like any other.
Here’s 10 tips and practical steps you can take to improve teamwork on your projects.
1.Be intentional not hopeful
Hope is never a good strategy on its own to succeed.Starting a project with the intention of cultivating great teamwork will set you off on the right path.
What you can do
2.Be SMART with your teams’ focus
Teamwork flourishes when goals are clear and where each team member’s contribution and focus aligns to it.
When developing goals, priorities, targets and actions use the SMART framework to make sure they are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timebound.
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3.Make meetings matter
As a general rule, the fewer participants in project meetings, the better the teamwork.In fact,researchconducted at Stanford University shows the most productive meetings have less than eight people.
More than that, decision-making gets side-tracked by too many conflicting opinions and irrelevant discussions.
A study by found that for every attendee over seven, meeting effectiveness is reduced by 10 percent.
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4.Bigger isn’t always better
Select small teams.Teamwork and performance of smaller teams tends to be better than larger teams.During the initial stages of Amazon, Jeff Bezos introduced a guideline known as theTwo Pizza Principle: each internal team should be of a size that two pizzas could comfortably feed.
A smaller team expends less effort on handling schedules and communication, develops greater trust and teamwork and dedicates more time to essential tasks, getting more done in less time than larger teams.
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5.Treat trust like astronaut does
Great teamwork relies on trust.Trust supports teams break barriers, embrace challenges, and step up to a new level of performance – together.Its trust that helps astronauts survive in space.
In 2015-16 astronautScott Kellyspent an unbroken year in space, setting a U.S. record.
Among the many lessons he learned from his time aboard the International Space Station, it was his focus on trust that helped keep him alive.
Trust in himself.Trust in his fellow astronauts. Trust that a million moving parts would get him safely into space and back.
Researchconducted by Durham University professor Bart de Jong found that teams that trust each other perform better.
And while some people are naturally more trusting, research has found that current judgments are stronger in determining trust than previous experiences.In other words, trust can be earned.
What you can do
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6.Communication quality beats quantity
When it comes to communication in project teams, quality is more important than quantity.Project teams operate under time pressures.
Being candid and economical helps make teamwork more efficient by cutting the time it takes to get to core of challenges and issues that need collaboration to solve.
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7.Make responsibilities clear
When each team member knows exactly what they and others are responsible for it reduces confusion and prevents tasks from falling through the cracks.
It also means people can more easily work with each other because they know who to collaborate with.
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8.Role model accountability
Teamwork relies on people doing what they say they will do, when they said they will do it.There’s nothing more frustrating than people committing to deliver something and not doing it.
Reliability helps build trust and erodes it quickly when it’s absent.
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9.Provide psychological safety
One of the most common causes of poor teamwork is having an unsafe team environment.Psychological safety is the feeling that you won’t be penalised or judged harshly if you disagree, admit a mistake, or ask for help.
And it’s integral for taking the kind of personal risks that are necessary for collaboration and teamwork.
Researchhas found psychological safety is one of the top predictors of team performance in settings as varied as a hospital emergency room and the Google office.
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10. Be deliberately developmental
Like any skill, teamwork develops over time.It gets better through experience and team members learning and improving.
You can accelerate teamwork improvement by being deliberately developmental, a term coined by Harvard University Professors Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow in their book ‘An Everyone Culture’.
Their research shows organisations that continuously nourish a culture that puts business and individual development front and centre for everyone, every day perform better over time.
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The difference between triumph and disappointment hinges on how well a team functions.
As challenges escalate, innovation flourishes, and the significance of teamwork amplifies. Especially in complex endeavors, the collaborative spirit propels success.
In the landscape of workplace projects, the amalgamation of diverse skills and experiences often paints a dynamic picture.Nurturing remarkable teamwork in such scenarios may seem daunting, but the key lies in viewing teamwork as a skill to cultivate.
These 10 tips can serve as a menu of topics to discuss with your project teams, a guide for further study and education or as quests to propel teamwork to new heights in your organisation.
At ThinkClear Group we help people in corporate roles excel at delivering projects.
Transforming Your Teamwork is part of our Project Excelerator Workshop program.
If you’re looking to level up your project delivery skills and fast track your career, visit ourwebsiteand book a discovery session today.
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