Recognizing the achievements of your team members pays back real dividends in terms of team cohesiveness, trust and performance. How you recognize those achievements can also have an effect as you motivate your team.
One of the most trying parts of office work, and a contributor to poor organizational culture, is the time spent in meetings. We’ve all been there: A team leader or department executive calls everyone into the conference room, where time drags by as concerns and issues are discussed.
One of the most powerful tools – for good or evil – in the team leader’s arsenal is feedback. It can be one of the most precise ways to measure the overall health of your team, identify problem areas, and find out if remedies are actually working. Used incorrectly, feedback can plant seeds of resentment among team members that may ultimately set everyone back.
Having conflict in a team is not a bad thing. In fact, healthy conflict around ideas can build team dynamics and galvanize productivity. Learning to identify and promote healthy conflict is a critical team development skill.
How many times have you felt that your communication was clear when communicating something to a team member or the entire team, only to find that you were misunderstood? And how often have you heard what a colleague said, thought you understood their meaning, and later discovered that you didn’t quite hear it right?
Clear and confident communication is an important team development component – whether it’s communication from a team leader to team members, or communication between members of the team.
Communicating person-to-person can be challenging, even when a team member or team leader is well-versed in the 3 V’s of Communication (Verbal, Vocal, Visual). These days, many employees communicate between departments and divisions exclusively through email or instant messaging (IM).
Consider the way that you communicate with colleagues. Do you show genuine interest in the things they’re telling you? Do you avoid make eye contact? Do you sometimes mumble when you speak, or not speak loudly enough?
I write quite a bit about effective teamwork in the workplace, because it gives team members and leaders a view of how great a team can be. Of course, real life tends to throw obstacles at our best-laid plans. And sure as the sun will rise, we’ll experience conflict of one kind or another—whether between team members, a team leader or a customer. Dealing with this conflict is one of the most important teamwork skills we can develop.
Last week, I counted the number of times that someone said to me, “Have a good one” and it was 107 times. Have we become a society of quick one-off phrases that, in many cases, are meaningless?
