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“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” — Charles Darwin
And isn’t it true of companies, too?
Today, teams are made up of the most highly educated, diverse, geographically dispersed and technologically advanced employees in history. They have the highest potentials of being top performers at work, yet those key attributes are often what prevent them from effectively collaborating within a team.
Catch 22? We thought so, too.
So here are five somewhat counterintuitive ways small businesses can help their high-potential employees better collaborate at work.
If roles are clearly defined, the team is more likely to spend its time getting things done, rather than negotiating job tasks.
Some believe that rigid roles discourage employees from helping each other achieve goals; they believe that titles poison collaboration. But if you leave employees to negotiate their responsibilities on their own, they’ll spend more time miscommunicating or protecting turf than they will actually getting the job done. Individuals won’t feel accountable for the project. Inevitably, the quality of work will suffer.
So how do more defined roles help? Simply, everyone knows what everyone needs to do. Teams work faster because they have clarity on priorities and where to begin. So if one aspect of a project goes awry, each team member knows the individual they need to approach and hold accountable. It’s also easier to get answers from the person who has defined expertise. The end result: Productivity increases and project execution is simplified.
Collaboration takes practice.
Companies should proactively educate its employees on different work ethics, methods, and outside forces that can affect team productivity. The more diverse and dispersed a team is, the harder it is to understand where obstacles are coming from and who’s to blame when the ball gets dropped.
That’s normal. Remind employees of that and offer them tools to overcome it.
One way to do this is to present employees with different models and tools of collaboration to ease communication barriers. At AnyPerk, we’ve held lunch & learns around Craig Weber’s Conversational Capacity as a way to explore how different types of communicators might be helping or hurting their team’s productivity. We’ve also looked at Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development to understand the natural stages of forming, storming, norming and performing that teams experience during growth.
Collaboration is by no means a smooth process. Teams should be open to conflict and feel equipped by their companies to handle it.
Managers should be the last ones offering their input.
In highly collaborative teams, employees aren’t afraid of keeping each other in check. If an employee is falling short on a project, it’s in their teammates’ immediate interests to ask, “Why are you struggling to meet your deadlines this month?” or “Our meeting started 10 minutes ago, what happened?” The boss shouldn’t have to repeat the question.
Peer-to-peer accountability is a powerful motivator. According to Harvard Business Review, members of the highest-performing teams aren’t afraid to hold their colleagues to high standards. Teams that are held accountable only by their bosses were deemed “mediocre” in comparison, and those with zero peer-to-peer accountability were the weakest.
Annual performance reviews should be a thing of the past.
Exchanging feedback regularly lessens the formality of the process and eases tensions. Managers and employees should be encouraged to set goals and exchange feedback based on those expectations. Eventually, the group will naturally help itself be better.
Whether it’s a handwritten “thank you” note or a 10-minute meeting discussing “what went well and what didn’t” with a presentation, keep feedback forums open at all times. Encourage employees to take their colleagues’ suggestions to heart, and grow together as a team.
The hardest part of listening to your team’s ideas is narrowing them down to a handful.
We tend to imagine collaboration and think of teammates working together harmoniously, exchanging ideas and covering walls with scribbled sticky notes. The reality is, 99 percent of those sticky notes will be tossed in the garbage, and the team has to firmly agree on which ones stay.
Be assertive about it. If a team decides to rally behind an idea or purpose, that’s the time to start assigning specific roles and responsibilities to each team member of the team. And guess what? We’re right back to square one.
Workplace collaboration is more than just working together to achieve a goal.
It’s a team’s ability to share knowledge freely; to be flexible enough to help each other meet deadlines and sacrifice time and ego to accomplish tasks that are obstructing team productivity. It’s offering feedback and ideas while respecting boundaries. It’s knowing the strengths of each of your teammates and leveraging them to cross the finish line together.
