Great teams don’t just happen. They are the result of leaders and employees who understand that effective teamwork is a key to organizational success.

🚀 Great teams 🚀 build trust and respect among team members, demonstrate accountability in their actions and decisions, establish relationships outside of team activities, set team-based goals and expectations, develop accountabilities for work assignments, and create a safe environment for honesty and transparency.

When you understand the value of relating to your team members as human beings first—and teammates second—these tips 👇👇👇 will help you build better collaborative connections and drive optimal results together.

If our leadership teams spent twice as much time trying to understand themselves in their environment and half as much time doing things, they would become much more like high-performing.
_professor David Clutterbuck

Have a clear purpose and commitment from every member.

Every team needs a clear purpose, including what you intend the team to accomplish, a description of the team’s relationship to other parts of the organization, and a description of how the team members will interact with each other.

If team members don’t understand why they’re on the team, they won’t feel committed to their work—and neither will their teammates. If team members aren’t clear on the relationship of the team to other parts of the organization, they won’t know if their decisions are above or below their level of authority. If team members aren’t clear on how they’ll work together, they won’t know how to establish the right relationships with each other.

Rotate responsibilities and build team synergy.

Great teams don’t just share assignments but also rotate responsibilities among team members. Team members should have the opportunity to lead and to assist in the completion of any project. Exchanging assignments and learning from each other helps team members build a greater sense of shared ownership for the team’s outcomes.

This strategy allows each team member to experience the satisfaction of contributing in a variety of ways and also enables team members to learn from one another. Rotating assignments also helps ensure that no one member becomes overloaded. And by rotating responsibilities, a team can benefit from the synergy of each person’s approach. Rotating assignments is a great way to build a culture of team synergy.

Establish a culture of honesty and transparency.

Communication is key to all human relationships, but on many teams, communication is poor and full of miscommunication. To build a culture of honesty and transparency, team members can consider implementing the following tips:

Leaders must share information quickly, broadly and honestly. Team members will be most engaged and will trust leadership more if they have an opportunity to communicate with leaders to share their thoughts and/or concerns. 

Younger generations have grown up expecting greater access to information and being able to gain access to what they want, when they want it. They live in a world where knowledge is available 24/7 on their smartphone. So, they expect the same from their employer.

Leaders can create a more honest and open environment by explaining the reasoning and rationale for their decisions. If leaders explain how they came to a certain decision as well as what impact the decision will have on the organization, department and team members, employees will respect their leaders more and will believe they are trustworthy and honest.

Leaders must respond positively to team members who are honest and open, even if what they share may be considered negative.

Build relationships outside of team activities.

Team members who know each other well and have outside interests in common are more likely to trust each other and work effectively together. When team members have something outside of team activities that they can bond over, they also have something to talk about and build trust with each other. This can be as simple as having lunch together one day a week or taking a few members of a team on a weekend hike.

Conclusion

Great teams are made up of individuals who are committed to their shared goal and who trust and respect each other. When teams are functioning appropriately, they are more productive and creative than individuals can be on their own.

This can only happen, however, when teams have the right members, clear goals, and effective collaboration strategies in place. These six keys 👆 can help you build better, more successful teams.

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