The modern business environment necessitates us to cooperate and coordinate with our colleagues quite a lot. Teamwork and collaboration are no longer merely nice things; they are absolutely necessary for corporate success.
In the past 18 months, most employees have increasingly worked remotely, necessitating virtual collaboration, which is not quite the same thing as working side by side with your coworkers. In this article, we therefore strive to elucidate aspects of collaboration and teamwork that are essential in the modern workplace and with the modern workplace being what it is—mostly remote—for the time being, many of our learnings related to teamwork and collaboration should be reapplied in this setting.
Creating Powerful Personal Connections
The basis for successful teamwork lies in interpersonal skills. As the name suggests, these skills relate to the interaction between people. Interpersonal skills primarily encompass the art of conversation, which can take many forms. Some people are naturally talkative, while others are born listeners. Despite these innate abilities, people can always become better conversationalists.
Developing excellent communication methods is the key to building powerful personal relationships. This is expressed by having the kind of conversation that leaves no doubt as to what you mean, and by asking the kinds of questions that can clear up any confusion. Most importantly, however, it means investing in the internal structure of your team so that conversations can be conducted in a safe space where every person truly does have a voice and a chance to shape the organization’s direction.
Emotional Intelligence is a well-regarded term used to describe an individual’s capability to understand and control their emotions. Given that the very basic level of our personalities is driven by our individual emotions, it is no small wonder that this single trait of understanding and managing our emotions has rated so highly when it comes to good old “people skills.” Success with people—it almost goes without saying—is at the heart of success in life. And consistently understanding the emotions within us and those surrounding us is the first path to success with people.
The concept of emotional intelligence is pretty simple. It’s the brains of leaders, and certain college students, that help them recognize and manage both their own emotions and those of their peers. People who are good at this are not only super smart in a book sense, but they’re good at interpersonal technical skills, too. They can handle anything. And that’s what you want in a leader. You want someone who can guide the team from the first moment to the successful end, even in the face of serious social and technical challenges.
Building emotional intelligence involves several key components: self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skills. When you possess self-awareness, you can more readily recognize your emotional hot buttons and figure out how your impulses and feelings are likely to make you act. Self-regulation allows you to manage your behavior and the feelings associated with it so you can act in the most “pro-social” and constructive way. Empathy is the ability to imagine accurately, and respond compassionately to, the feelings and suffering of others. Finally, we need strong social skills to communicate effectively, build and sustain good relationships, and negotiate the sometimes choppy waters of human interaction.
Collaboration: People Working as a Team to Achieve Shared Objectives
Working together toward common goals is what cooperation is all about. It means sharing the work and sharing the vision. When we cooperate, we join forces to accomplish something that we could not do on our own. That is not always easy, of course. But for teams that manage to find a way to work together and not merely side by side, the relationship is a worthwhile one.
Cooperation can be nurtured by setting up clear goals and roles within the team. This means that we must make sure that everyone knows both what they are responsible for and how it contributes to what we’re trying to do together. And we should not only be telling people what to do—we should also be doing it through dialogue, because it pays off in terms of people trying harder, being more creative, and taking more risks. Cooperation, remember, is all about shared responsibility. People must do their parts. And in our system, that’s what we think all team members should be doing—working together toward the achievement of a common set of objectives.
Combining forces: harmonizing for supreme effectiveness.
Coordinating the work of a team means seeing to it that the group’s members carry out their tasks both well and quickly. It means making a group effort run to schedule. Good coordination requires good preparation. Almost everything you do to prepare for a coordination activity will pay off if you take the effort in the planning stage, in organizing what needs to be done, in synchronizing the start and finish of the tasks, in preventing duplication, and in “priming” your people for the hand-off that will carry out the next level of the work in your plan.
Having a clear plan and timeline for tasks and projects is key for effective coordination. Check-ins and progress reports should be regular and at a frequent enough interval that helps to ensure both completion and quality. By using some of the simplest, most accessible project management tools (think pen and paper, whiteboards, or their virtual counterparts), teams can almost instaneously enhance their productivity.
Problems Anyone Can Solve
Issues naturally arise as groups work together and have to coordinate across multiple tasks.
Privacy is becoming a problem.
To conclude, one can say that the potential of teamwork and shared work is vast. Indeed, during these last few years, we have jumped light-years ahead in our understanding of the dynamics of team functioning. And the future holds even more promise. But as we design and work in teams, we must be mindful of what we are doing. And part of this means understanding that effective teamwork must be designed, supported, and managed—and that it does not just “happen.” A good team does not just inform, communicate, and coordinate its actions; it also organizes, makes meaning, and on a daily basis, creates and recreates a framework of norms and values that undergirds its work. And as the team does this, we are at work creating a successful and vibrant team—this is our coactive effort in action.
Working together is quintessential for attaining the triumph of an organization. Establishing rapport, understanding, cooperation, and coordination among team members are not merely “nice-to-have” qualities; they are the A, B, C’s of a positive and productive work environment. These basic yet beautiful skills allow individuals to come together and exude the kind of chemistry that is visible and that makes people want to be around and in the company of the team.
The investment in teamwork and collaboration not only leads to better individual results, but it also sparks overall success within an organization. This holds especially true when one considers that today’s best companies are moving away from maintaining collections of people who work somewhat independently to cultivating real teams that work together toward a common goal.
Organizations that value and promote the skills needed for top-notch teamwork and collaboration build high-performing teams that can handle the challenges they face and knock them dead. Better individual and team performances will lead to a superior company.
