Communication and Commitment are Essential for Successful Team Working

One of the fundamentals for successful team working is being clear about the purpose of the team, however clarity is not enough to successfully deliver the business outcome required.

Some teams are teams in name only, they are simply individuals who sometimes come together physically or online, and have no common purpose or meaningful bonds that tie them together.

The first and most crucial task of a team is to actually become a team.

Kick Off Event

A Team Kick Off Session is an Effective First Step for Individuals to Become a Team.  It provides the opportunity to communicate the purpose of the team, and how it’s goals fit into the overall business strategy.

Sharing the core outcomes expected of the team is crucial together with explaining specifically what the team will collectively be held accountable for.

In our work with clients we have found that following this briefing by facilitating a brainstorming activity focused on how to capture and monitor achievements and collective accountabilities creates energy, collaboration and ownership.

This initial task is interactive and every input should be captured and positively received, encouraging contributions from everyone and demonstrating mutual respect, as well as stimulating innovative thinking.  It also establishes the expected working practices of mutual respect, co operation and a willingness to work together.

This task focuses minds on deliverables, and channels inputs in the direction of bottom-up, rather than top-down.  This approach automatically identifies gaps and anomalies, and in so doing achieves alignment of efforts across the whole organization at all levels.  Another benefit of this exercise is it also identifies where feedback loops are needed to allow for refinement in processes and monitoring.

Next Steps: Individual and Team Commitment

Each person on a team is committed to the need and purpose of the team, they respect the other members of the team, sharing and contributing constructively with the other team members to achieve their shared team goals.

You may have extremely talented individual contributors, however each of them need to agree to being a member of the team, sign up to the purpose of the team, respect other team members as well as themselves, and work together positively, committing their unique talents to delivering the team’s shared goals and outcomes.

More on Commitment in the next post on Team Working