Your team will have specific goals to achieve. The way you set out to achieve those goals will come down to the people you have on the team, and the context that you work within. What works for one team may not work for yours and your team will have its own unique culture to identify and cultivate. Here are four areas to pay attention to set your team up for success:
Vision and values
Exploring team vision and values might seem to get in the way of the immediate, pressing work that a team needs to do. With growing to-do lists, it can be hard for teams to set time aside to explore the more intangible elements of their work. By missing out on this opportunity to get aligned, your team will be just surviving, not thriving – getting by on a day-to-day basis. When you’re able to explore why you’re doing the work, and how you’ll approach it together, it pays dividends in increasing engagement and productivity.
Individual talents
To build a fantastic team culture, explore how individual contributions and roles of each team member contributes to the bigger picture. Move past just a task list and explore how to make the most of the talents that you have to make it happen. Consider the unique perspectives that people bring to the team and how you can shape your work around that. This will need some self-awareness on the part of each team member – when am I most creative or productive? What are my working habits? What do I need to do my best work?
Team creativity, productivity and collaboration
To bring all of this together, explore the dynamics that might emerge between the different styles of working. Develop an understanding of the principles that underpin the best team environments, such as autonomy, motivation, clarity between roles, trust and psychological safety. When teams can normalise conversations about how they work together, it becomes easier for them to design, experiment with and iterate what best suits the team and the context they work within.
Changing behaviour
As part of exploring how to improve team creativity, productivity and collaboration, you may realise there are existing ways of working that you’ll want to change (and change is hard!). You might look at how you meet, when you’ll make time for individual work, how to create better connections and communication and even the physical space that you work in. By evolving these ideas for new ways of working into actions and behaviour you’ll form the team habits, routines and rituals that support your unique team culture.
Ready to get going? Check out the Team Culture Programme.