8 ways to build collaborative teams
8 ways to build collaborative teams
While technology enables us to connect up the right people, from multiple locations, to form highly skilled teams - collaboration can be a major challenge.
A study of 55 large, diverse teams, reported in Harvard Business Review, reveals that the key to success comes down to eight practices that fall under four categories.
Executive Support
Teams do well when executives support social relationships, demonstrate collaborative behaviour and create a ‘gift’ culture where interactions with leaders and colleagues are regarded as valuable and generously offered.
- Investing in ‘signature’ relationship practices - Executives had invested significantly in building and maintaining social relationships throughout the organisation. The ways in which they had done this varied widely. They had ‘signature’ practices that were memorable, unique and well suited to their business environment.
- Modeling collaborative behaviour - The perceived behaviour of senior executives played a significant role in determining how collaborative teams were prepared to be. In one company, senior executives frequently travelled to different locations for face-to-face meetings. This visible interaction created may opportunities for other staff to see the executives in action. There were also photos in each location, of groups of executives working together. Through this sort of modeling, staff quickly learned that the best way to get things done is through informal networks.
- Creating a ‘gift’ culture - Executives ensured that mentoring and coaching were embedded in their own routine behaviour and throughout the company. This was done through formal processes and a more informal approach where mentoring was integrated into every day activities. It was found that the latter was more likely to increase a collaborative culture.
HR Practices
Two practices were key to improving team collaboration.
- Ensuring the requisite skills – A number of skills were found to be crucial: appreciating others, being able to engage in purposeful conversations, productively and creatively resolving conflicts and program management. Training employees in these areas made an important difference to team performance.
- Supporting a strong sense of community – The study found that HR can play a critical role in supporting informal community building through group events and activities that reinforce a friendly, family-like culture where the organisation is viewed as a community.
Team Leaders
Groups that had high levels of collaboration had team leaders that were flexible as managers.
- Assigning team leaders that are both task and relationship oriented – The most productive and innovative teams were led by people who were both task and relationship oriented. These people could change their style during the project. Typically, in the early stages, they showed task oriented leadership that made goals clear and clarified responsibilities. Once team members had settled into their roles and were focused on their accountabilities, team leaders switched to a relationship orientation.
Team formation and structure
- Building on pre-existing relationships – Given the importance of trust to successful collaboration, the study found that forming teams which capitalised on pre-existing relationships increased the chances of success. People who already knew and trusted each other formed nodes that evolved into networks over time. The study found that where 20% to 40% of team members were already well connected, the team showed strong collaboration from the start.
- Understanding role clarity and task ambiguity – Collaboration was found to improve when the roles of team members were clearly defined and well understood such that they could do a significant proportion of their work independently. Also, team members were more likely to want to collaborate if the path to achieving goals was somewhat ambiguous. If a team sees the need to be creative it will invest time and effort in collaboration.
Through careful attention to these factors, organisations can foster collaborative teams in spite of the challenges of size, distance, diversity and complexity.