Delegate problem-solving tasks to the team. Let the team work on creative solutions together. Facilitate communication. Remember that communication is the single most important factor in successful teamwork. Facilitating communication does not mean holding meetings all the time.
Instead it means setting an example by remaining open to suggestions and concerns, by asking questions and offering help, and by doing everything you can to avoid confusion in your own communication. Establish team values and goals; evaluate team performance. Be sure to talk with members about the progress they are making toward established goals so that employees get a sense both of their success and of the challenges that lie ahead. Address teamwork in performance standards. Discuss with your team: What do we really care about in performing our job?
What does the word success mean to this team? Team trust building activities, such as team-building exercises, can increase the sense of team bonding if performed on an appropriate and regular basis. In this article, we will explore five activities which can increase trust and psychological safety within teams in a fun way. Many people groan with dread when they are faced with the prospect of doing team building activities with their work colleagues.
However awkward and sometimes forced these activities can be, they can be highly productive in fostering a more trusting and tight-knit working environment. If you have a team spread out across offices or who work from home you can use an app like QuizBreaker. It's an online ice breaker game that helps teams get to know each other through a fun online weekly quiz.
For example, which of your colleagues said that their dream vacation would be to Melbourne, Australia? Scavenger hunts never go out-of-style. This results in the employees needing to work together with good communication and trust that the entire team is all on the same side. Each employee is buddied up with another and they sit back-to-back for the duration of the activity. One person is given a pen and paper and the other is given a picture, or diagram, that they must describe to the other person as well as they can.
By relying on each other to give and follow instructions, there should be an increase in trust between the pair. The nature of the activity encourages individuals to try and come up with outrageous facts and fibs in order to confuse their colleagues. By taking employees out of the workplace for an outing or reward, people are able to see one another for who they are as individuals, and not just as colleagues.
Many organisations just stick to the once-a-year work Christmas meal, however monthly or quarterly events can increase trust within teams and promote better working relationships. By gathering in an informal setting, people are more likely to share more personal information about themselves; such as their family or hobbies.
Not advised for those with medical conditions, Escape Rooms encourage team trust through adrenaline-fuelled tasks to escape a locked room or maze. Recent research has suggested that participating in social games, such as an Escape Room, produces better results in increasing team trust than engaging in team building exercises. However, one should not totally dismiss the multitude of scholarly articles in which team building exercises have been highly praised for their ability to significantly increase trust and morale within organisations.
By advertising rewards for meeting certain targets, team members are likely to be more enthusiastic about working together to gain the reward. On the other hand, rewards could have larger monetary value, such as winning a day out, or a meal, for the team. Each person could describe what they did over the weekend, or if they have any exciting plans coming up.
Another option is to create an instant chat group where workers can talk to one another throughout the working day, or when they need advice regarding something of a work matter. By building up a repertoire, remote workers can feel as though they can trust and rely on their distant colleagues. Do they show up for work with a purpose of adding value to the team and to the company?
Would they recommend others to apply for a position on your team? Do they feel a sense of fulfillment in their daily work environment? These are questions every leader must continually assess. Hopefully, your team members would answer yes to all of the above. But you need to know for sure because you simply can't afford to lose any good team members. The costs involved in retaining a good employee pales in comparison to what it costs to hire and train a new team member.
Not to mention the lost sales you realize while going through the transition. Great team leaders leverage the best team building activities use team building tools to achieve greater results. To the contrary, weak teams get weak results.
What kind of team are you building? So what kind of team building tools are needed to create and maintain a strong sense of teamwork in the workplace? Team building examples come in many forms - as you'll soon see. Bottom line, team building doesn't have to be very difficult at all.
It's really a simple matter of understanding the true value of your best employees and effectively communicating your honest appreciation to each team member.
Here is where you get proven team building tools used by some of today's most effective team leaders. The Blake-Mouton model plots these two orientations on different axes. Managers or leaders fall into different quadrants based on how they weigh people and results. This indicates their leadership style. Teams need people who complement each other, but they must coordinate their work. Some aspects of effective collaboration, such as communication, tend to deepen naturally with time.
Others, such as group cohesion, have to be actively worked on. The members of a successful team are all oriented toward achieving the same purpose, and they have the same idea for how to get there. If goals diverge further, tensions or even conflict may appear, costing the team more time and money. Teams who fall victim to groupthink have little trouble developing consensuses, but this is only because they actively refuse to consider anything beyond a small subset of ideas and do not want to engage critically with unfamiliar or dissenting alternatives.
There are, however, team learning and negotiation techniques that can reduce the effects of groupthink. One of these is concept attainment, a teaching technique that can be used with groups of middle-school age and older.
Concept attainment promotes understanding of concepts via observation, rather than using concrete definitions. For example, a concept-attainment-style lesson on different schools of art might show students several different art works and encourage them to form definitions for each school based on common characteristics.
The same can be done with groups of adult learners. The technique relies on the group building a consensus to define concepts, but it also reduces groupthink by removing the boundaries created when concepts are defined outright. This tends to make alternative definitions seem somehow wrong. Another technique for building consensus while minimizing groupthink is the Delphi method. This technique was developed during the Cold War to project how technology might change warfare.
But it can be used to develop consensus around any continuous variable. To begin the exercise, each member anonymously estimates a given variable. The group then reviews the anonymous estimates, and sets a baseline for the next round of estimates; the process is repeated until a consensus is reached. The fact that estimates are made anonymously and concurrently prevents groupthink, as each participant is not aware of the limits that other participants impose on their own estimates.
Earlier, we discussed how team assessments are based on theories of what makes teams work. This is why the Five Dysfunctions are represented as levels on a pyramid, with the absence of trust represented as the foundation of the pyramid.
A lack of trust, says Lencioni, is the root of all dysfunctional behavior. But since trust is an inherently personal relationship, how does one improve it throughout a team? This works especially well when a team is still young, but it can work with people who already know each other, too.
Try having team members complete a personality instrument such as the MBTI or Everything DiSC Workplace, and then share their results with the team, with insight into how they think their personality type and natural traits influence their behavior.
Open-ended questions that encourage people to talk about themselves are the best choice here. For more on team-building questions, check out our comprehensive resource that includes example questions to try with your team. And lastly, make sure your team members see each other face to face often. This can happen for a couple of reasons. Sometimes, team members may not be confident enough to challenge senior figures within the team, or they may keep clear of conflict out of desire to be accepted by everyone in the team.
At other times, the avoidance of conflict at a team level may be a function of a general reluctance to deal with conflict among a majority of team members. If results are shared with the team, these tools have the added benefit of enhancing mutual understanding of conflict styles, which can make things a little easier for everybody.
To address a lack of productive conflict at the team level, set clear expectations for how team members are supposed to interact with one another: fairly, equitably, critically, and with an open ear. You may also want to set rules for engagement; some teams, for example, allot people uninterrupted time to speak during discussion sessions.
These things can help productive conflict emerge during meetings, which can otherwise be intimidating for those reluctant to engage in conflict. If your team displays a general reluctance to deal with conflict, talk to the team leader about having someone to ask the tough questions and thrash out the decisions that team members are reluctant to make. This results in a lack of commitment to team decisions and team goals, which can cripple a team.
This kind of commitment problem is best treated by addressing the underlying causes: lack of trust and reluctance to engage in conflict. Lack of commitment can spring from other causes besides a lack of trust and productive conflict. Sometimes teams struggle to set goals for themselves, or the goals they set are unclear. When decisions are made in a meeting, review them at the end of the meeting, and make sure the communication is cascaded.
Lencioni explains the cascading communication tool as a way of having leaders communicate key messages to their staff, who do the same with their staffs and so on. Sometimes, a team makes decisions based on the views of a small majority. When this happens, you need to ensure that the whole team commits themselves to the decision — but how? But since a compromise does need to be reached, have the team set up a contingency plan that allows them to revisit the decision.
Articulating the worst-case scenario might also be a viable tactic here. Like a lack of commitment, the absence of accountability is a result of preceding dysfunctions. That said, there are some things a team leader or supervisor can do to ensure the team practices accountability.
Then, publish a set of behavioral standards which the team is expected to follow. Get each team meeting started with a lightning round , where team members quickly report on their progress since the last meeting. But you can also cultivate this directly.
Also, make sure that a team's thematic goal is in clear alignment with organizational goals. You can also incentivize team performance by having compensation programs reward team-based achievements. Lastly, remember that in most organizations, people shoulder a number of responsibilities besides their membership in a team. A general rule of thumb is to have people prioritize their responsibilities to the teams they lead over the teams they participate on. If lack of trust leads to fear of conflict and a variety of other problems, it follows that building trust would reduce fear of conflict and prevent the succeeding dysfunctions: lack of commitment, accountability, and poor results.
If the five dysfunctions are the root causes of problems with teams, the five behaviors help you avoid those problems. The five behaviors are simply the reverse of the dysfunctions: trust, productive conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. Just like the dysfunctions, each positive behavior breeds the next.
By building trust, you lay the foundation for an effective team. There are several things to keep in mind when selecting an assessment for your team and your situation. No single assessment works for all situations or teams. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Cost, as always, is a consideration. But the most effective and sophisticated tools cost more and are usually part of a package that involves a consultant to oversee the assessment, explain the results and draft action plans.
These engagements typically run into thousands of dollars. Before selecting the assessment tool, isolate what you want to learn about your team. Are you looking to gauge the quality of team processes, such as communication or delegation? Always aim to address the biggest problems first. In fact, shoot your team an email, or have them answer a few questions with a simple online survey to get their input on the type of assessment needed.
Download Assessment Form Here. If the assessment is to be followed by a discussion, workshop, or group facilitation, run the assessment before you start working with the group, so you have the results to shape the rest of your program.
Make sure all team members participate. If you're facilitating the session, make sure you set a good example. Keep in mind that even within each broad assessment category, different assessments are designed for different purposes. Better still, bring in a professional to run the assessment. Lastly, remember that team assessments are simply an evaluation tool that cannot necessarily override the nuance and subjectivity involved in teamwork.
Trust your team. Personality and behavioral style assessments try to help individuals understand their behavior as a function of naturally emerging personality or style traits.
Understanding your own behavior helps put your strengths into perspective, while allowing you to understand how your coworkers perceive you. Your coworkers do the same, which creates a greater, team-wide understanding of why people behave the way they do.
Personality and behavioral style assessments are designed to be taken by everyone in a team or workplace as a way of understanding how coworkers can work together most effectively and minimize frustration. These tools are not suited to solving specific problems, but they provide a common language for people to understand workplace behaviors.
Tips: Assessments of this type often produce lengthy personality reports - allow your team some time to digest them before debriefing.
When working with teams, raise the question of behavior style representation in your team. Does your team have a single dominant style? What does that mean for their work? Personality and behavioral style assessments can be tailored to highly specific skill assessments.
Leadership assessments usually have two main aims: helping leaders understand the behaviors they exhibit their leadership style , and helping leaders understand how they are seen by the people around them. These assessments usually look at such things as communication, creativity, decision making, planning, goal setting, progress monitoring, team communication, coaching, and operational knowledge.
Some are degree assessments, gathering data from people at all levels of the organization who interact with the leader to create a holistic picture. Leadership assessments are designed to be used with people who have occupied leadership positions for long enough to have settled into a reasonably consistent leadership style.
Gather feedback discreetly and as always, discuss the results privately. Team assessments are based on diverse approaches. Think about your reason for conducting the assessment. Are you trying to help new team members understand each other better? Is your team running into communication problems?
Choose a tool that focuses on the subtleties underlying this problem. Select an assessment that examines performance factors. Tips: Behavior style assessments and leadership assessments can also be viewed and used as team-building assessments. The former increases interpersonal understanding, which improves collaboration. The latter improves leadership, which can strengthen team efforts. While assessments that focus on leadership and behavior styles are helpful for all teams, new teams should prioritize trust, which according to Patrick Lencioni, is the foundation of all good teamwork.
Assessments may focus either on the trustworthiness of individual team members or shared trust within a team. Since trust is a highly abstract concept, different assessments measure it in unique ways.
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