As organisations change to become more flexible and we ask our people to work in dynamic situations, it’s important to consider how to maintain the best team environment.
There’s a lot to consider and it’s not as simple as getting the right people in the right roles, there are a number of other behavioural and physical settings that can influence how well a team performs.
So, to give your thinking some structure, a good place to start is the fundamentals of team operations, including the essential ingredients for success and the optimal climate.
Druscott and Wolfe (2001) have documented three critical conditions for team success and they include member trust, a shared sense of identity and collective efficacy.
While there are no surprises here, the challenge is developing these conditions for teams that are geographically spread and who have little personal contact through which to build trust, collective identity and efficacy.
A similar challenge is developing self-confidence, or efficacy, in a new team who have not yet experienced success together. This gap may be filled by sharing the previous successes of the individuals, identifying and celebrating early wins and giving the team the freedom to try and fail. As much as success benefits a team, a failure where some great collective learning’s are gathered can be just as beneficial.
As important as the conditions are the environmental settings, or team climate. Anderson and West (1998) suggest that an ideal team climate includes a shared vision, participative safety, task orientation and strong support for innovation.
The two elements that stand out here are participative safety and support for innovation. These require genuine collaboration, trust and transformational leadership.
It is important to note that participative safety is not about protecting team members from criticism.
Rather, it’s about developing enough collective respect so that members can critique each other in an open and positive way, stepping away from blame and focusing on how members can learn from each other. In much the same way as sporting teams that pat each other on the back or slap hands in support even when they have made a big mistake, participating in safety empowers a strong group culture, supported by a sense of objective accountability.
Strong support for innovation aligns with an exciting organisational theme of encouraging entrepreneurialism within company ranks. As Randi Zuckerberg describes in her discussion of latest trends, what she calls the “Entreployee” can meet the needs of the creative individual while giving the company the level of progressive thinking it needs to stay competitive. Organised events like “hackathons” first seen in the ranks of Facebook employees have fuelled the consideration of sprint-based efforts that are removed from your standard tasks. No matter what the method, supporting innovation requires leaders to deliberately relinquish control and encourage efforts guided by a few boundaries and some key principles.
In fact, the glue in all of these elements is positive leadership.
We know that in the early stages of team development, members are overly dependent on their leader as they “suss out” their peers, consider how they will contribute and determine whether the modus operandi of the team works. In relation to the forming, storming, norming team development model, leader reliance is especially heavy in the first two stages.
There is also a heavily reliance upon the guidance of a leader in times of change. In particular, shifting from a traditional hierarchical team environment to an open, collaborative and honest working style requires a leader to step up, model the new behaviour and show the move is genuine by taking on some criticism and really working with it.
All told, the team setting needs to be a continual point of reference for a leader and indeed the team members. It is common place for elite athletes to visualise a strong performance before competition and often this visualisation is strengthened through remembering how good a previous win felt. As a team, the same approach can be taken through recognising great success, the feeling of team harmony and the steps that contributed to a positive outcome.
Under the high performance team methodology developed by Stockwell Bretton, these moments of optimal team performance are captured, celebrated and leveraged through photos, imagery and story-telling.
This has the effect of making corporate teams feel like elite athletes, which often leads to members taking their team settings much more seriously and reaping the benefits. After all, everyone wants to feel like a champion, highly supported and at the top of their game. After all, isn’t that what we strive for in our organisations?
