5 Ways to Build Collaboration In Your Team To Step-Change Performance
I am sharing 5 proven practical ways to build collaboration in your team. Firstly why should you care about the getting high levels of team collaboration? Assuming your team members have interdependent roles – i.e. they rely on each other for information, work, resources, solving problems, decision making and more – then collaboration directly impacts team performance.
The more team collaboration – the quicker work is completed, the solutions created are better, better decisions are made quicker, co-ordination of activities is higher, development is higher, the less roadblocks team members suffer, … in short the better and quicker everyone works.
More team members doing better work in less time equals better team performance.
5 Ways to Build Collaboration In Your Team To Step-Change Performance
- 8 proven ways to build trust and safety across the team
- Show the team how to overcommunicate
- Use 3 practical ways to persuade team members to work together
- How to build a helping team culture
- Why resolving conflicts quickly is so important to build team collaboration
My History
I have personally transformed multiple worst teams in many different companies and at the start team collaboration was next to zero. Everyone was working in their silos, doing their own work. Talking and communication was low. The office was almost silent.
6 – 12 months later, those teams were a hive of collaborative activity. Team members were constantly talking, sharing ideas, helping each other, overcoming problems together, … there was a constant background buzz of voices. Measurable team performance had increased. Not by 5 or 10%. By 500%+. Measurable value creation was 5-10 times higher. Of course not all of this massive increase was due to great team collaboration, but a big portion was. With great collaboration, 1 + 1 really can equal 5. This is the power of getting teams working together, co-ordinating activities and supporting each other.
Collaboration is at the heart of any successful team. Team collaboration refers to the process where team members work cohesively towards clear team goals, maximising usage of individual strengths, collective skills, knowledge and experiences. Great teams are created by using their team members differences to maximum effect
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To build collaboration in your team, first build trust and psychological safety across the team
Without trust you don’t have a team. Without trust you will not be able to build team collaboration. Everyone will be too focused on protecting themselves and hiding their weakness rather than achieving goals. The activities that drive team performance will be low – such as co-ordination, playing to strengths, helping each other, peer development, etc.
There are a lot of ways to build trust with a team. My top 8 that I try to practice every single day are:
- Be authentic and true to myself and my values
- Demonstrate and live personally what I ask my team to do
- Build personal connections with every team member – share your interests, views and ambitions and find out about theirs
- Spend a lot more time listening than speaking – show a lot of interest in others
- Champion transparency and openness – share information, talk about the good and the bad, what went well and not so well etc
- Be direct and honest – tell it how it is
- Create emotional and directional predictability in the team
- Consider every action, decision and behaviour through the lens of trust building with the team BEFORE doing or making it
To Build Trust
To build trust in the team, I also provide the team with as many frameworks and as much clarity as practical. I then consistently stick to them as closely as I can, which is not always easy. Consistently taking these actions creates psychological safety within the team. They know where they stand and what is expected of them.
To create team collaboration, create and communicate shared team goals and direction, clear expectations, clear roles and responsibilities and individual targets to drive accountability.
Always consider how team trust is impacted by everything you do.
The second way to build collaboration in your team is to show the team how to overcommunicate
Team collaboration is communication. If you don’t have much communication, then you really don’t have much collaboration.
Get your team communicating with you and each other. You can’t make them do this, but you can encourage it through what you do and what you ask for.
Start with you own communication. Personally demonstrate how you want all the team to communicate. Think about how often and how you communicate. Think about every single interaction you have with your team members on a daily basis. Here are some practical ways to demonstrate good communication:
- Share the activities and projects of the company with your team. Give them the context in which they are working, solving problems and making decisions.
- Make your own communication clear, honest, direct and with purpose
- Ask a lot of questions and listen carefully to what you are being told
- Give positive feedback daily and make it honest, direct and specific
- Ask team members for help and use their suggestions, ideas and solutions
- Build communication habits in the team – with meetings, huddles, updates etc
- Promote transparency – don’t withhold useful information, be clear, be honest, tell it how it is
- Share financial and operational data so the team can make their own minds up on progress and performance
There are so many ways you can show your team how you want them to communicate. Then ask them to follow your example. Create opportunities for them to communicate and persuade them to adopt your communication habits. Great actions to improve collaboration in teams.
The Third way to build collaboration in your team is to use 3 practical ways to persuade team members to work together
To start cultivating collaboration in teams, set the expectation and ask your team to collaborate. On its own, asking is not enough. As well as asking, I suggest you create opportunities to get team members working together. This is great to:
- Strengthen their relationships
- Get them to appreciate each other’s skills and ability
- Show them that together they can solve problems and build solutions faster and better than trying to do this individually
- Increase their willingness to ask the other person for help and advice
All these elements help create trust of colleagues and foster future collaboration in your team.
A few examples of how I create opportunities to improve team collaboration.
When team members come to me with problems or when I spot problems, instead of solving them myself, I might ask two team members (or more) to work together to come up with a solution. I intelligently pair individuals who maybe don’t work with each other much or who are relevant to the problem.
Get Team Members Working Together
I organise mini projects to be completed by small groups of team members. Ask mini groups to come up with a joint decision, or a joint solution or a joint plan. There are so many opportunities.
This does take more time initially than maybe doing the work yourself. However, over time, you are building skills, confidence and collaboration in the team. You are in effect delegating more and more work to team members, freeing up you own time. Your team members will also find they speed up delivery of their own work, giving them more time. For example, rather than struggling with a problem for an hour or two, they ask a few of their team members for help and it is solved in 10 minutes and implemented.
Push team members together to build collaboration in your team.
Fourth, tips on How to build a helping team culture
A big part of cultivating collaboration in teams is being willing to admit weakness, gaps and lack of experience. Trust is a must for this. When you are prepared to show weakness, you are also prepared to ask for help. Getting help speeds everything up.
There is nearly always someone in the team with better skills or experience than you in certain areas. Ask them for help and you overcome your challenge in a fraction of the time.
Imagine how fast a team can work when EVERY team member, including you, are doing this every day.
Sharing weakness and asking for help has to start with you, the leader. Find the confidence to share and make yourself a little bit vulnerable. Start on the small areas that are minor weaknesses. Don’t dive in with a real pain point. Build your confidence to share more significant weaknesses and ask for help.
The more you do this and encourage your team to do this, the more help everyone will provide to each other. Jump on any activity or behaviour that conflicts with building a helping culture in the team. Never let anyone in the team put others down, make fun of them or any other negative behaviour that prevents them asking for help.
Use lots of praise to encourage the behaviours you want.
Get everyone in the team helping each other. Create the expectation and live that expectation every day you can in front of your team.
The fifth way to build collaboration in your team is to resolve conflicts immediately
Conflicts kill collaboration. To create high levels of collaboration in the team, you must resolve any conflict as quickly as possible. You need your team to know that you are not afraid to step into conflict and get a resolution quickly without blaming or damaging relationships.
Resolving conflicts immediately they occur will increase your credibility and authority AND increase the collaboration within the team.
Conflicts occur for many different reasons. Often, conflicts arise because of confusion over expectations, responsibilities, role boundaries and other external factors to the parties in conflict. Other times, conflict arises because of a clash between two people.
Don’t delay. As soon as you spot or hear about any conflict, work with both parties to resolve the conflict as quickly as possible. The earlier you tackle the conflict, the easier it is to resolve. People’s feelings have not been hurt as much and their emotional investment in their position is a lot lower.
I have a free conflict resolution infographic taking you through the steps needed to effectively resolve conflict quickly and amicably. I will include the link in the description below. If that will help you, do take a look at this infographic explaining how to resolve conflicts quickly.
Remember, the less conflict in your team, the more collaboration can flourish.
In summary
The leader of a team is in a brilliant position to increase the level of collaboration across the team. You have a lot of options to encourage each team member to collaborate more and to better utilise the strengths within your team.
Do put each of the ways to build collaboration in teams into practice or work harder at each with your team. As reminder they are:
- 8 proven ways to build trust and safety across the team
- Proven ways to show the team how to overcommunicate
- 3 practical ways to persuade team members to work together
- How to build a helping team culture
- Why resolving conflicts immediately is so important for building collaboration in teams.
If you have any questions on “5 Ways to Build Collaboration In Your Team To Step-Change Performance”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
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