The Four Pillars of Teamwork

SUMMARY

In a world where there's so much self-induced isolation with people, having their faces glued to the screen of a smartphone, conventional ways of developing teams don't work anymore.

So, stick with me because in this week's episode, I want to continue our conversation around teamwork and help you to understand the main areas to focus on.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the Year, and Master Coach Trainer, and today I want to continue our conversation around teamwork and collaboration, in the fourth quadrant of Social and Emotional Intelligence - Relationship Management - by unpacking with you The Four Pillars of Teamwork.

In this episode, I will share with you the four key areas you need to assess and educate your team members in so that you can build the team that you need right now.

The first pillar is collaboration.

The second pillar is conflict.

The third pillar is change.

The fourth pillar is communication.

Where is your team right now?

Is it time for you to look at these four elements a little bit more seriously so that you can go through the next stage that your organisation is going through right now with a greater level of confidence and commitment towards what it is that you're wanting to achieve?

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around teamwork and collaboration, by helping you to establish your own team charter.

I'll see you then.

TRANSCRIPT

In a world where there's so much self-induced isolation with people, having their faces glued to the screen of a smartphone, conventional ways of developing teams don't work anymore.

So, stick with me because in this week's episode, I want to continue our conversation around teamwork and help you to understand the main areas to focus on.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the Year, and Master Coach Trainer, and today I want to continue our conversation around teamwork and collaboration, in the fourth quadrant of Social and Emotional Intelligence - Relationship Management - by unpacking with you The Four Pillars of Teamwork.

Over the last couple of weeks, we have been looking at this competency of teamwork and collaboration and been unpacking things like the formation of a team.

We looked at the fact that there is “I” in a team and that's the individuals that make up the team.

And we looked at the basics of doing things like forming a team charter and putting things in place that as you go through each stage of evolution will help you to grow and to develop a team that gets the results that you want without all the stress and conflict.

So, what I want to do today is continue that journey by putting some practical steps in place so that you can go from that team that might've just formed, or could be in the storming stage, so that you can develop a performing team.

Being in this ever-changing, fast-paced VUCA world where there's volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity means that you need to take a different approach to develop your teams.

This approach needs to be more aligned and people who do what I do, training and coaching in organisations, need to make sure that we are helping you to build the competencies that make the difference in today's world.

20th century leadership training doesn't work because 20th century leadership doesn't work either. What we're developing are leaders and teams that work in the 21st century.

Over the last couple of years, we've been through a lot of things in the world that have created an even greater sense of uncertainty. And now more than ever, teams need to be able to come together and collaborate, and individuals need to be able to work within that team so that it supports them and they in turn support the others in the team.

What I want to do is give you the four key areas you need to assess and educate your team members in so that you can build the team that you need right now.

Now, this list is my list, and it was challenging for me to bring it down to four key areas. You may have some different ideas.

So, what I want you to do is I want you to focus on what it is that you agree on here, and look at it at that concept level and go: “If we were to develop these four competencies in our team, what are the results that we could see differently to the ones that we've got right now?”

For me, I love alliteration. And if I can put a framework around anything that has elements that all start with the same letter, it helps me to remember them. And therefore, it helps others to remember them as well.

I get the privilege of working with many teams, particularly in the area of senior leadership, all the way around the world. And in my experience, this are the four key elements that I get to work on all the time. When you work on these, it brings the greatest result.

Let's unpack them one at a time, and then we'll wrap it up and look at what we're going to continue with next week.

The first pillar is collaboration.

So, asking yourself the question: “How well does my team come together to work towards an aligned future, to bring in the individual gifts, talents, strengths, areas for development, those “I-s” that come together, so that we can work alongside each other and get the results that we want?”

When individuals come together and collaborate, you get way more done in a much shorter time with even less resources.

The collective intelligence of a team means that you can solve problems quickly. And then you can employ people from within the team who are working alongside each other to solve the problems. It's one thing to come up with a solution. It's another thing to be able to implement that solution and change the things that are happening in your team to get a different result.

So, teams need to be collaborative. Teams need to look for opportunities to work together rather than work against each other.

So, what does collaboration overcome?

It overcomes solo mentality, individuals being there just for themselves, and it overcomes a lot of the conflict that comes with that.

So, collaboration is like a rowing team who have one goal in mind and that's to go as straight as possible as we can from point A to point B and get across the line first.

To do that, that team needs to come together. They always need to hit the water at the same time, they need to pull the oars back the same distance. They need to lift the oars up out of the water at the same time. And by doing that, it takes the boat faster and straighter, and they get to the goal a lot quicker. Within that team, depending on the size of the crew, we've got someone at the helm, someone who's giving direction, someone who's giving motivation and drive and instilling a sense of “let's get this done together.”

So people have different roles within the team. Putting those roles together and collaborating means you get the job done. So that's why I find that collaboration is the first key pillar when building any team.

The second pillar is conflict.

Now you might be thinking, “Are you saying that we want to put conflict into our team?” And the answer to that is yes. And in fact, you've already got the conflict there.

We talked about that weeks ago. Conflict is inevitable. It's going to be there whenever you bring individuals together who have different agendas, different ideas, there's going to be conflict, particularly in that storming stage, which is when a team can develop a deep level of trust and get all those edges smoothed off so they're ready to become a performing team. Most of that comes from conflict.

What I'm really talking about here is how that team handles conflict.

How a team handles conflict is important to the success of any team. Understanding that conflicts are inevitable and realising that you don't live in a utopia that it's always going to be there, having a strategic way that you work together, collaborate through that conflict, will create a way more successful team.

If conflict is something that is avoided at all costs, nobody speaks about the elephant in the room. Everyone just wants to get on well together. And they have this naïve understanding that “If I just forget about it, we'll be able to get through this.” That doesn't work. You need to be able to tackle any conflicts that come up and deal with them in an effective way. Deal with them in a way that says, “Hey, it's okay to have a different opinion. It's okay to have conflict. Let's come together and make sure that using our team charter that we talked about a few weeks ago, we have a set of guidelines that says, this is the way our team navigates conflict.”

So, conflict, in my experience, is very valuable in developing a team because it uncovers the different ideas. It uncovers the creativity of the team. And through those well-managed conflicts, great ideas emerge and are implemented into strategies and results of the end result.

So, the question to ask yourself here is, “Is your team distracted too much by conflict or is it part of the journey and it's recognised that way.?” And therefore it's quickly dealt with, and you use it to move forward together.

The third pillar is change.

Change happens all the time. And in fact, change once again, which is looked at negatively by a lot of people in teams, is a good thing.

Can you imagine a team getting to that performing stage without change? Realising that change is inevitable, and necessary, means that you will shift and adjust. Self-awareness will go beyond just knowing to doing something about it.

So, change is a vital component for a team to be able to go from forming, storming into performing.

The first thing you need to do is shift the mindset around change. Change is good. Change is healthy. And once again, just like with conflict, it's not so much the what, but the how that brings the success here.

How do you navigate change?

Firstly, how do you look at change? Do you see it as an opportunity for you to grow closer together? Do you see it as an opportunity for you to overcome and therefore strengthen your team? What do you say to something that's getting in your way? And “Oh, no, not another change.” Now, those changes aren't just external, those changes are from within the team as well.

We talked about last week that teams adjourn or they reform - transform and people come in and out of the team. How you manage that change as a team, how you look at it, how you navigate it will definitely be a big indicator of whether or not that team is going to be able to perform at the sustainable high level that they need to today.

And the fourth pillar of teamwork is communication.

Whether it's in that collaboration, whether it's in the conflict or the change, communication is what brings it all together.

Communication is something that's being talked about for many years. It's one of those staple training elements of any program in leadership and in teamwork.

However, you need to look at communication in a slightly different way. You need to not just look at the individual communication or the communication of a leader to their people. You need to look at communication from the team as a whole. How does that team communicate? How do they come together in any situation and be heard? And that obviously comes from the individual abilities in everyone that's in the team being able to learn how to actively listen, how to give feedback, how to communicate all those practical skills that we deal with in self-management.

However, when they all come together, that sweet sound that comes from a team, which is working like clockwork, which is well-performing, which communicates and cuts through all the noise of all the distraction and all the problems and challenges that others are going through in the world that their competitors are focused on rather than moving through means that a team can become so strong that they are resilient and as change continues to happen, they communicate their way through it.

Communication is so important for the success of any team, whether that's communicating up, across, down or out to the world, to your customers, to your suppliers, communication is what brings that all together.

So the question to ask here is “How is your team communicating? Did they give each other feedback and if they do, how is that received and dealt with? The people speak up when they need to. Are they encouraged to do that or are they stifled whenever they speak in a meeting, so therefore they never say anything again?"

Communication is one of the four key pillars of teamwork.

Education in these four pillars of teamwork is crucial for any organisation who wants to have teams who are progressive, moving through stages, changing, shifting, transforming, reforming, storming, all back to norming. These are the pillars that when focused on, you will get a greater return on your investment.

This education starts with awareness.

So what I encourage you to do is if you're leading a team or a member of a team, then take yourself through this process of audit and go, “How do we handle conflict? Do we collaborate well together? Change is something that we look at how? And How do we communicate with each other?” These are the questions that will help you to understand where your team is right now.

So whether they're at forming, storming, norming, or performing, these are still four areas that you can look at right now and assess, “Okay, what do we need to work on?”

So it starts with awareness and then change comes through implementation of different strategies to the ones that you might be using right now.

A lot of times, that's what I get called in to do, is to do that process of evaluation and then to get people engaged in what needs to be done differently before the education process, and then to have that wrapped up in empowerment where I can provide an element of support and accountability to help that team to grow incrementally in those four key areas.

So where is your team right now?

Is it time for you to look at these four elements a little bit more seriously so that you can go through the next stage that your organisation is going through right now with a greater level of confidence and commitment towards what it is that you're wanting to achieve?

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around teamwork and collaboration, by helping you to establish your own team charter.

I'll see you then.