Teamwork in the Workplace: Creating the Conditions.
How do you create the conditions for effective teamwork in the workplace to flourish? Good team leadership is about creating the conditions that allow ideas and people to flourish, people to come together and performance to flow. When you balance developing people's strengths, with building good relationships and connections between people, in the pursuit of challenging and meaningful team goals you are moving a long way towards encouraging effective teamwork in the workplace. These three factors we suggest are central in creating the right conditions:
- Developing individual strengths
- Establishing good relationships with others
- Pursuing worthwhile and meaningful goals
All three aspects have of course been shown to be important to people's happiness. Focusing on our own strenghts particularly when in the pursuit of goals we feel are meaningful to make a difference is a crucial building block for being happier. It's a similar story with our relationships and "connectedness" to others. The strengths of our relationships have repeatedly been found to be the strongest links to finding happiness in life.
So there is a good chance that developing this kind of teamwork in the workplace will also create a happier place to work. Here's our recipe for effective teamwork in the workplace:
Developing the Strengths of Individuals
- Ensuring you place a high value on the ideas of others
- Allowing time to foster creativity
- Encouraging personal mastery - and personal growth and learning by encouraging the team to "continually expand their ability to create the results in life they truly seek." (Senge)
- Building on the strengths of your colleagues in the team
- Align and blend strengths of individuals so that they complement each other
Cultivating Relationships and Friendships
- Trusting the team to deliver.
- Develop your own teamwork definition that you all share and fits your context
- Thinking Win-Win. Consistently seek mutual benefit in what you do. Cultivate an abundance mentality - there is more for everyone and together people can achieve more.
- Seeking First to Understand. Communication is the most important skill in life. Seek to understand another person's view first, in order to best put your view forward. To communicate well you must listen first.
- Developing a shared vision as well as encouraging personal vision.
- Align people's sense of togetherness with the vision of where you are going.
Encouraging Performance to Flow
- Energizing team learning - the potential wisdom of teams, where individual talent combines for the benefit of the team and energy and activity is aligned in the same direction;
- Encourage the team to take on meaningful challenges which are manageable ( high challenge with high skills)
- Together generate clear goals, that you share and to which you are committed
- Provide immediate feedback on performance (so that it is clear how well everyone is doing) and encourage others to support and provide feedback to each other.
- Align strengths with good teamwork in a common direction towards meaningful goals
http://www.the-happy-manager.com/teamwork-in-the-workplace.html, The Happy Manager - a better way to manage, Copyright © 2007 - 2011 - the-happy-manager.com
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