Help your team to find better ways of working
When you’re busy doing the work, taking time out to think about how you get things done feels like the last thing you have time for. But unless you get on the front foot in defining what great looks like and how you’ll work as a team to deliver it, you are leaving to chance the impact the work will have. Working in the same way you worked in the past 12 months won’t deliver growth in a competitive market when everyone else is innovating.
This is where Team Practices really count. Defining the way that your team works. That’s because the culture of the team and how colleagues in the team work together, is more important than any stated company culture. Monocultures don’t exist, performance happens within the team culture.
The way the team works matter most
In 2016, Google published its findings on what made teams successful. Building on the work of an MIT study on collective intelligence Project Aristotle, found that the team’s interaction styles (e.g. allowing everyone to speak, acknowledging the feelings and ideas of everyone) where important for high performance. Theses are the “group norms” – the traditions and behavioural standards that influence how the team work together.
The study concluded that there are five key characteristics of more effective teams: dependability, clear goals & well-defined roles, the work has personal significance to each member, belief that their work delivers real impact and psychological safety. And it was psychological safety – creating an environment where it’s safe to share ideas and be yourself, that really stood out as the most important characteristic.
The research is clear and unequivocal. Team Practices are a key differentiator of performance. Google Aristotle had put greater definition around a similar finding from a study 20 years earlier of over 350 employees in 60 business units at a financial services company: the greatest predictor of a team’s achievement was how the members felt about one another.
What do Team Practices define?
Team Practices need to be crafted to matter to the members of each team. Team size, team longevity and who else within the company the team interacts with are all critical factors that determine the type of practices are most helpful in different situations.
Team Practices define what supports team quality and performance and will typically cover:
- Ambition setting
- Recognising what each member values, wants to contribute and receive
- Creating the capacity for great work and how to stop being pulled into reactionary workflow
- Owning the process, not letting the process own them (blaming process for getting in the way)
- Managing conflict (being mindful that a degree of conflict is good!)
- The differences between debate, discussion, and dialogue
- How the team makes decisions and plans
- How the team communicates within the company
Questions to think about
In order to go fast, slow down for a moment and think about how you are balancing getting work done with finding new ways to work.
- Where on the spectrum of struggling to flourishing are we as a team on a scale of 1 to 10? What would help move us closer towards a 10?
- How engaged is the team in the work that they do?
- Where does test and learn work well and where does it work less well?
- What are the most difficult or frustrating parts of your working month and why is that?
- Which interactions are the most important ones for your work, and do you want to make them even better?
- Which are the most difficult or involve the most conflict and why might that be?
Flow is a ways of working company. We help you to create the conditions where your people can flourish, where decisions, meetings and ideas can flow. If you’d like to discuss how we can help you to improve your Team Practices, get in touch at hi@thisisflow.co
