If you’re looking at your team and finding that either, you’re not achieving enough, or that you are achieving things, but it hurts way more than it should, then it sounds like it’s time to work on team effectiveness.
The first category of things you can do to change your team for the better, to enhance your team effectiveness, is to focus on becoming better aligned. Alignment means making sure that everyone on your team knows how they add value and how they add the most value. It involves clarifying roles and responsibilities within the team, identifying intersections of work, understanding the team’s value proposition compared to other teams, and aligning all these efforts to create value for key stakeholders, such as customers or shareholders. Good alignment ensures that every action and decision, from how you spend your time daily to overall goals, is directly linked to adding value for these stakeholders.
Start Outside the Organization
One of the strategies I find that can enhance a team effectiveness process is to start with things outside the organization. Considering factors outside the organization makes people more receptive and more motivated to improve than if you start by focusing on behavior.
Looking at things outside the organization means beginning with a discussion about changes in the external environment. For example, what’s changing in the outside world? Think about how advancements in AI are radically changing work processes, or how higher interest rates and inflation are impacting operations. There are always things going on in the world that you can use as catalysts for questions about whether you need to refocus on what you’re paying attention to, what value you’re adding, or what your priorities are. And those questions are great team effectiveness questions.
Ask questions about:
- Opportunities and threats.
- Strategies — Do we have the right strategies to capitalize on opportunities and mitigate threats?
- Tactics — You may have great strategies, but you’ve used up one set of tactics and it’s time to refresh and get new ones.
- Goals — Maybe your strategies are fine, but it’s time to change your goals. Or perhaps you’ve got a bunch of goals and need to make them more ambitious to keep pushing the envelope. Or maybe the environment is evolving in such a way that you won’t be able to achieve your goals, so you need to adjust them to a more realistic level.
Addressing these things can lead to a better-aligned team on the same page about what’s happening in the world, how it’s affecting your organization and your team, what you need to pay attention to differently, and what you need to do more and less of. This alignment cascades down to each individual, empowering them to start their day knowing what they need to pay attention to and what to prioritize, and it’s the quickest way to a more effective team.
What’s interesting about realignment is that you avoid confronting triggering situations when you go into a team effectiveness exercise because it doesn’t involve pointing fingers or assigning blame for negative behavior. Realignment is the best place to start if you want to energize or revitalize your team.
Revitalize Your Team
If you’ve done all of those things and you’re better aligned, and everyone understands what the priorities are, then great. But there’s a second component, and it’s more about team dynamics.
You may need to revitalize your team, which boils down to a fundamental question: Do you need to focus on building trust? Trust is the foundation of all team dynamics. Whether you’re striving for transparent communication or engaging in productive conflict using radical candor, as Kim Scott describes it, the presence of trust is key.
Things That Build Trust
You want to come back to things that help you build trust. For example:
- Maybe you need a better connection between team members. Connection is the most fundamental thing.
- If physical proximity has been lacking, or if you’ve never worked with a group of people before, invest in a couple of days just to talk and have some downtime.
- If credibility is the issue, and people aren’t confident in one another, invest in skill development and performance management to build trust.
- If reliability is the primary issue, if that’s what’s eroding trust in your team, it’s crucial to go back to that and talk about it, how it’s affecting the team, address any misalignment of priorities, and make sure everyone is meeting their commitments to each other. Openly discussing how these challenges affect team members can foster understanding and cooperation.
- Of course, it may be more at the level of integrity. And if it’s at the level of integrity, it’s going to take a lot of time and energy to get to a place where people can be vulnerable with each other, and share how behavior affects each other.
Use an Assessment Tool
When it comes to improving team effectiveness, I highly recommend using an assessment tool. My favorite assessment tool is the Birkman Method, although alternatives like the Hogan Assessment Suite and DISC are also valuable. You can use these tools to help people become more self-aware and to gain an understanding of how one’s style and behavior impact others. The time and money invested in these assessments is usually very well spent!
But there are other things that you can do:
- Work on your ground rules
- Renegotiate how you’re going to treat one another
- Focus on productive conflict
Obviously, a lot of my work is about enhancing the amount of productive conflict on your team. Focusing on increasing productive tension and decreasing unhealthy friction is excellent for improving team effectiveness.
When to Work On Team Effectiveness
I always advise that you work on alignment first. Address the business issues, make sure everyone has shared expectations about the value they need to create as individuals and as a team, and that you have your systems, processes, expectations, roles and goals, and all that good stuff aligned accordingly.
Start by addressing alignment and then move to focus on behaviors. Assess whether there’s trust among team members, whether there’s a sense of connection and reliability, and whether you can count on each other. Ensure that team members understand each other as people, and encourage open and honest communication, even when the conversations are difficult. This one-two approach ensures that you’re getting both dimensions of what makes a team effective.
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If you want more advice on how to deal with these trust issues, I have a whole series on how to bolster trust at each level, starting with how to repair a relationship when trust is broken.
10 Tips to Prevent Misalignment from Destroying Trust
How To Increase Accountability