How to help people feel connected and part of a team: Strategy 2.2 – Create opportunities for team members to work together

We have previously published a series of practical leadership actions around the themes of people feeling supported, valued and safe; creating a ‘team environment’; supporting learning and growth; empowering staff and building autonomy; ensuring clarity of roles and expectations; and creating meaning and purpose.

We are now going to explore the actionable steps that you can take to enable the suggested strategies and actions. This is one in a series of 31 posts providing specific descriptions of the actions in practice.

So, this post focuses on the theme of helping people feel connected and part of a team. In a previous post we have talked through 5 overarching strategies to support people feeling connected and part of a team:

2.1 Open up decision-making and information in the team

2.2 Create opportunities for team members to work on projects and problems together

2.3 Work on the ‘team’ to build a sense of ‘we’

2.4 Proactively manage conflict within the team

2.5 Cultivate personal connectedness within the team

In this post we take a deep dive into the specific strategy of:

2.2 Create opportunities for team members to work together.

Working with others fast-tracks knowledge and skills transfer as well as building long-term bonds and support between colleagues and leaders have a key role in facilitating such opportunities.

So, here are some of the actions that can be taken to put this leadership strategy into practice:

Engineer collaborations by asking certain people to work together on projects or issues. Rather than allocating work projects or improvement activities to an individual (even if the task could be clearly done by one person) ask a few people to work together on the activity. Think about matching people up where they could learn from each due to different skill sets or experiences, or where there would be value in people getting to know each other to develop stronger relationships. This could be done more formally through work planning processes or as tasks are assigned in team meetings. Be transparent in explaining why you are asking people to work together.
Organise ‘brainstorming’ sessions with the team at early stages of projects / work-related issues. While activities might be assigned to individuals or small teams, you could occasionally organise a broader group to be involved in the early stages of scoping or generating ideas. Even if other individuals have little expertise or knowledge in the topic, it provides a great opportunity to tap into ‘the wisdom of the crowd’ as well as generating a much great sense of team – we’re all in this together, even if it’s not my project. Again, be transparent in why you are inviting a broader group to participate.
Encourage team members to help each other, accept and appreciate differences and utilise each other’s strengths. Make helping your colleagues a key value of the team – take the opportunity during a team workshop to describe practical behaviours. There can also be great benefit in using profiling tools that help team members better understand the different needs and strengths people bring to the team and how people can work together better. Another technique involves all team members creating and sharing their own user-manual, covering such matters as How to best communicate with me? How to help me? What people misunderstand about me?
Encourage team participation by recognising and rewarding projects or activities that rely on teamwork. Making teamwork a key value or focus for the team provides a strong signal that it is highly valued. The value of teamwork can be reinforced by openly recognising examples of great teamwork. This could involve such things as regular ‘shout-outs’ at team meetings (ideally by anyone, not just the leader), passing on positive feedback by a senior leader, holding project celebrations, using formal organisation recognition programs, publicly profiling in newsletters, or writing a thoughtful email to the team that specifically recognises teamwork.
Provide opportunities for staff to discuss ideas and innovations and provide support and resources to them when appropriate. During team meetings, individual one-on-one meetings, or even hallway conversations, various challenges or potential opportunities may be identified or discussed. Rather than send someone away with a ‘problem’ or defer until another time, encourage people to get together to explore some ideas and ways forward. Give them a timeframe and make it clear that you are available for them – you may be able to offer more support or resources to help them make further progress.
Invite team members with different strengths, experiences and perspectives into conversations. It is typical in the workplace to have discussions with people who are directly responsible for key activities, invariably with content knowledge, skills, and experience relevant to the task. It might be a good idea, on occasion, to deliberately invite people with different expertise and perspectives to participate – to ask the ‘dumb’ question, to challenge conventional thinking, to offer insights free from the detail or constraints, or provide experiences from different domains. Whilst potentially generating new insights, it also reinforces a whole team mentality, with everyone able to make a contribution to the team’s success.

Having read this list, some questions you may want to ask yourself might be:

Are there one or two ideas emerging for me that I might want to put into practice?
What is the smallest thing I could do that might have a positive impact?
How will I hold myself accountable for following through on my actions?

Good luck!