Successful teams: what’s the secret?

Knowing each team member

Teamwork is critical in most of our workplaces these days. We all enjoy being in a high performing group doing great work supporting and learning from each other. But building and maintaining successful teams doesn’t just happen on its own.

Where does it sit in your list of priorities as you strive to achieve results, meet deadlines and take on new responsibilities every day? It can become ‘nice to do but don’t have the time right now…’

If we shift our mindset from seeing team building as what you do when you go ‘off-site’ for a day to something that you are always nurturing, then you will get more work done more effectively and efficiently.

There are many factors that help build successful and effective teams and there are lots of guides out there to help you ‘Build a High Performing Team’. In this Part One article, I am focusing on the first essential ingredient of team success – knowing each team member. Part Two will look at other factors of success based on Patrick Lencioni’s model of the Five Dysfunctions of A Team.

From my working and coaching experience, I see that individuals and teams often have issues with:

• a lack of commitment to the task and poor quality work

• jobs needing to be done more than once because people don’t get it right the first time

• second guessing each others’ motivations

• directions not clear or well understood

• rumours and gossiping

There can be a range of contributing factors, but one of them is certainly how well team members know each other. And by that I am referring to what makes a person tick, what their preferences are and what they need to do their best work.

Getting to know each other needs buy in from team members. It also needs a leader with genuine commitment and interest in growing and learning about themselves and their ways of working and communicating.

Psychometric tools such as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) can provide a useful and non-judgmental way to look at individual strengths and gifts. It also helps to identify how people like to work and how they behave under stress as well as enabling teams to use each other’s difference to achieve greater success.

The data from the MBTI can be used to better help team members:

• understand one another's different preferences, skills and attitudes

• identify collective strengths and potential blind spots of the team

• help team members avoid making unproductive judgments about one another

• leverage the diverse approaches and perspectives of the team

• accelerate trust by speeding up the process of team members getting to know one another.

If you don’t have access to tools like these or resources to support their use, then a simple first step can be team members sharing a little more about themselves over time.

The following questions are examples that can be used to open up different conversations:

1. What’s your personal story:

• Where you were born

• How many siblings you have

• Something uniquely challenging/unusual about your childhood

• The thing you are most proud of in life

2. What’s your work story:

• What was your first ever job

• What has been your best job so far (other than current one)

• What’s a big mistake you have made in a job

3. What’s really important to you at work, for example:

• Getting positive feedback

• Making a difference to others’ lives

• Using all my skills and expertise

• Freedom to try new things and being challenged

• Brainstorming ideas and responding quickly

• Structure and time to think

4. What you don’t like at work, for example:

• Conflict

• Taking on too many risks

• Too much change and lack of clarity about my role

• Having to switch tasks often and meet tight deadlines

• Too much structure and direction

• Being asked to think on my feet without time to consider data and other input

Through the use of tools, being open to asking questions and similar processes, a team can gradually build their collective understanding of how each individual can be supported and grow to do their best work.

If you decide that teamwork is critical to your work, then feel free to get in touch to see what support I can offer you and your team.