What Makes the Modern Team?
How people work is changing. Increasing emphasis is being placed on teamwork and cooperation between coworkers; today, MBA programs are filled with student teams, the expectation being that modern workers will need to manage team dynamics, collaborate across departments, stay in communication with other employees, and juggle all the new responsibilities workers have in the 21st Century. But why do certain teams succeed and others fail? It’s not as simple as throwing smart people together in the same room. Proper team management requires appraising your employees’ values, skills, temperament, and more to create a team worth more than the sum of its parts.
Understanding Team Dynamics
Many companies are becoming obsessed with maximizing worker performance, and a key factor in productivity is inevitably tied to how employees contribute to a team’s output. The rise of Big Data has provided powerful tools to minutely analyze what actually makes a high-performing team successful, and one of the most recent insights was just published in The Harvard Business Review. They found that “the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more” over the last two decades, with the majority of their time simply spent communicating with colleagues. The ability to work effectively with others is now one of the most important skills a worker can have, and managers should be working to make sure employees are placed in the right environment.
The Reason Certain Teams Succeed
Researchers have settled on the idea that group norms have a large impact on a team’s productivity. Group norms are the unwritten rules and behavioral standards that define a group’s behavior with each other. For example, one team may have a culture that encourages vigorous debate before a decision is reached, and another may believe that sober discussion and agreement produces better outcomes. These group norms end up overriding an individuals personal work preferences and can be a source of friction and stress.
So what norms end up being enforced by successful teams? It may surprise you, as many different types of teams can be successful for different reasons. A high concentration of smart, hard workers wasn’t the recipe; a more well rounded group often found ways to make up for individual weaknesses and adapt quickly to changes. There were two main factors that indicated a team would succeed: First, members of a successful team all spoke for approximately the same amount of time. Each team member was provided opportunities to talk throughout the work assignment and have their opinion heard. This creates feelings of value and responsibility for team members, enhancing productivity and job satisfaction. Second, successful teams had a high average social intelligence; that is, they could tell what and how their teammates were feeling as part of the team. Low-performing teams often had members who weren’t sensitive to how their colleagues felt about their work or the team, leading to increased stress and inefficient outcomes.
How to Create Strong Teams
The main two factors are equal speaking opportunities and encouraging social sensitivity between team members, but there are some other indicators of success. Making sure a team has clear goals is important, and so is creating an environment with a high degree of psychological safety and a culture of dependability. Managers need to create teams that listen to each other and are there to support each other. It doesn’t mean that work relationships become more than professional, but it does mean that giving your conduct at work a more personal touch could do wonders for your colleagues’ performance.
The act of creating and managing teams has an outsized impact on the success of your business. However, there are a lot of resources out there to help you succeed. If you’re thinking of starting a business, becoming a franchisee is a great opportunity. To learn more about entrepreneurship through franchising, attend our free monthly webinar, Franchise Ownership as a More Stable Career Path. The webinar is free, but you need to pre-register, which you can do online by clicking on the linked seminar title. You may also register by calling 866-246-2884.
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