Most people assume that team collaboration is the same thing as teamwork — but it is not. We know that teamwork means discussing tasks that need to be done, who will do those tasks, and then you are off and running. But it is important to know that a collaborative team is more than that, and their difference is not just a matter of semantics.
What is team collaboration?
Collaborative teams are slightly different from traditional teams because their members have different skill sets. When there is collaboration in a team, they are able to share similar goals, resources, and leadership despite having varying areas of expertise. And by using their diverse set of expertise, they’ll be able to solve problems as a group.
One best example of group collaboration is rope-pulling. A group may have an engineer to explain the mechanism of rope-pulling, a foreman to decide the members of the team and other roles who will use their expertise to solve the problem. Using their varying expertise, they’ll be able to solve their common goal, which in this case, is to pull the rope.
10 Simple Ways to Build a Collaborative Team
Collaboration for teams is a key factor in building small businesses because it cultivates productivity, energy, and success. Here are simple ways you can do to transition from a traditional team to a collaborative team.
1. Establish a common goal and purpose
We are told that a collaborative team means being able to solve problems despite their differences in skills. To make those differences work, they must have a common goal and purpose.
Some ideas you can do to create a common goal include creating and reviewing the team’s charter. If you’re thinking about re-creating your charter, you may add the following:
- Team purpose
- Goals
- Team member’s roles
- Work processes
- Communication
You can also discuss the purpose of your team, and allow each team member to express commitment.
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2. Institute new team collaboration policies
Feel free to institute new policies within your team. For instance, require all your team members to answer during meetings and brainstorming (“We All Answer” Policy). This will help you avoid having only your stronger employees participate. Additionally, you will be able to develop a more diverse plan that can ignite innovative ideas.
You can also institute a “No Bad Ideas” policy. This policy involves encouraging your team members to suggest and say anything without judgment. Doing this will make them feel confident. In the future, they might be able to come up with creative and better ideas without fearing rejection.
3. Assign leaders who are not just task-oriented — but also relationship-oriented
Some may argue that being task-oriented is the best leadership style. Though, others suggested that relationship-oriented leadership is the most appropriate, especially in complex teams. But if you want to instill collaboration in teams, you must assign leaders who are both task-oriented and relationship-oriented.
The most productive and innovative team we know are led by leaders who are both task- and relationship-oriented. They make their goals clear, engage in debates, and clarify the responsibilities of their team members. At the same time, they also know how to socialize with their employees. This shift often happens when tensions around sharing knowledge of team members begun to emerge.
Read: 7 Easy Steps to Delegate Tasks Effectively
4. Foster unity between team members
A collaborative team foster cohesion within their people. This makes them successful because every team employee is included in as many decisions as possible. This makes them feel like they belong and that their role is significant which causes them to naturally perform better.
To establish cohesion, your team should participate in daily huddles to discuss your goals and objectives for the day. This will help them draw out duplication of effort and competition among team members. Additionally, daily huddles will keep everyone on the same page and will enable them to redirect their efforts.
5. Maintain clear-cut HR practices
Obviously, human resources are part of establishing collaboration in a team. After all, collaboration is not solely in the hands of the executive team. During our study, we found out that the impact of a wide variety of HR practices (including selection, promotion, rewards, and training) is influential to one’s team performance.
One thing we learned is that HR’s type of reward system had no discernible effect on the team’s productivity. If you truly want to improve team collaboration, the HR department must invest in both of these practices: training in collaborative behavior-related skills and supporting informal community building.
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6. A collaborative team must communicate their expectations
The bare minimum of every collaborative team is to have clear communication between one another. To promote this, the team leader must provide its members with defined individual and collective roles and responsibilities within the team. When they have a clear knowledge about their role, it helps them work more effectively and prevent unforeseen conflicts.
Read: The Importance of Good Communication in the Workplace and How to Improve It
7. Appreciate your team’s diversity
By now, we all know that team members come from all walks of life. They have different backgrounds and perspectives which makes their strategies and knowledge different from one another. To build a collaborative team, you must take advantage of your team’s diversity.
Remember that each person differs from one another. But luckily, you can use that as an opportunity to learn from other people’s experiences. At the end of the day, the more diverse a group is the more innovative your ideas can be.
8. Trust each other
Your team exists for the purpose of solving problems and reaching goals. Having a shared vision and goals means you must trust each other despite the differences in personality and mindset. The best thing you can do to foster trust in your collaborative team is to instill honesty. Encourage your team not to lie about their progress. Tell them to be honest if they have any problems or questions about their tasks so that you can teach them or reassign the task if that’s the best option.
9. Operate based on principles, not structures.
According to Marshall, the principles of collaboration include ownership, responsibility, alignment, self-accountability, integrity, mutual respect, and trust. As a team leader, it is your job to help the team turn these principles into operating agreements. Doing this will serve as the foundation for mutual trust, high-performance, and respect in your team.
10. Understand why teams often fail in the first place
Oftentimes, team failure happens due to poor relationships, ineffective meetings, turf wars, competitions, and little transparency. As long as these are the team dynamics, expect that your team will not be effective as you want it to be. Take a closer look at your team’s relationship and diagnose what isn’t working. Or much better, you can get team members to look at what’s going on and think about how collaboration would resolve such problems.
The reason why we encourage collaborative team over traditional ones is because of its various benefits. Through collaboration, decision-making becomes faster and more customer-driven. It resolves conflict around the workplace as work relationships open up. Most of all, a collaborative team has a higher production capacity than that of a traditional team. We hope that these collaboration strategies help you toward attaining your goals and solving work-related problems.
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