The pandemic has brought challenges to teamworking, including a shift to the virtual space. What are the do’s and don’ts of teamwork magic?
by Erik de Haan and Dorothee Stoffels
As a result of the pandemic, teams and how they work together were in the spotlight after teamworking went online pretty much overnight.
We’ve seen so many inspirational and hopeful messages about teams in this challenging time that we felt moved to share our thoughts and experiences based on our work, both as team coaches, but also as members of faculty for the Team Coaching programme at Ashridge Business School.
Some of these might feel quite radical and our intent is to provoke you to stop and think, re-evaluate and decide how you and your clients want to show up in teams.
The Do’s
- Realise the survival value of teams for us all: we were formed over millions of years to live and work in small groups, to be part of something, to belong!
- Nurture the team back – the team is nurturing you biologically, so take some time to celebrate what is good about your team, and give as much explicit support and praise to others on the team as you can.
- Provide and ‘be’ the stability your
team needs – with stability and containment, the best work of individuals can emerge. As you feel how teams have the potential to nurture you and others, you realise how much you need them to be stable and there for you. Be available for others: allowing open conversations; providing and receiving challenge to and from the team. - Look upon your team members with forgiveness and benevolence: as Aristotle noticed, our intentions are ‘towards the good’ even if they don’t always work out that way.
- Look after ‘us’ and ‘them’: teams benefit from clear boundaries but also from good relationships with other teams.
The Don’ts
- Don’t work in ‘yet another team’ unless you absolutely have to: Research has shown that everyone in a team is at least 25% less productive than working by themselves, through communication losses, social loafing, and other challenges.* If you don’t need a team, or don’t need to meet, then don’t.
- Don’t let the leader speak. If the leader speaks it’ll be mostly to share what she or he already knows – and most of it the rest of the team will know already too. We’re biologically wired to be very attentive to our leaders. The best use of team time is for the leader to listen, and be swayed. Upwards communication is the sole added value of a team.
- If you carry on working in the team, don’t use a facilitator or team builder. Again, they’ll only take up time, complicate communication further, and, like the leader, might say what everyone already knows. Engaging a team coach, whose aim it is to help the team reflect, learn and raise awareness of patterns and ultimately become redundant, is a much better use of limited time and resources.
- If you, or a client, are still working in your team and it’s not going well, don’t worry; try to reflect. Reflection is the single known improver of teams. It makes a team make better decisions (building on upwards communication) and demonstrably makes the team more innovative, resilient and productive.
- If you’re still working in a team, you’ve done very hard work and you need to be rewarded for it. Regular breaks, informal moments, celebrations, appreciations for all the team. They deserve it: they’ve overcome natural selfish-gene tendencies to do something for the whole. And it sure hasn’t been easy.
Reference
- E de Haan, Team Coaching Pocketbook. Alresford: Management Pocketbooks, 2017
- Erik de Haan and Dorothee Stoffels are both members of faculty and programme directors of Ashridge’s Team Coaching Programme for Organisational Consultants. For further information, see https://www.hult.edu/en/executive-education/programs/organizational-development/team-coaching-consultants/