Every team, regardless of the environment, has a common issue that hinders their high performance. That is team synergy. It’s not just about working together in harmony. Team synergy means taking into consideration how diverse your team is in strengths and weaknesses. It’s also about finding out your common values and goals.
Why is team synergy so important? Well, for plenty of reasons. For starters, we are all complex beings. Your opinions, personal traits, and emotions are not the same as that of the next person. Even in how we think, that difference can make us work better individually but exceptionally poorly as a team. This concept of team synergy can be encapsulated by the physics concept of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.
Poor synergy is the result of a disjointed team. What does this mean for your company? The list of internal issues business leaders could face include unaccountability, poor team performance, conflict, blame games, inefficiencies, disrespect for guidelines, and a clear set of rules, insensitivity to other people’s opinions, and ultimately, low productivity.
Is there something you can do about it? Absolutely. You can make a great team by ensuring that you work hard to increase your team’s positive synergy. Here are three tips to help you with that.
1. Support Your Team When They Need It
The keyword here is empowerment. There are times that your team will need support in different forms, including emotional support. It’s up to you to provide encouragement and tools to ensure that your team succeeds. You need to keep in mind that the success of the team is more important than your success.
For instance, your team members need to know that you have their backs no matter what may come. Let them know that you trust them to have yours. As a team leader, your faith in their abilities is critical to their success. If your team lacks this, then succeeding becomes tricky business and the end result not so pleasant.
Here are some tips to help you support your team better;
Make check-in a priority
Leaving your team for too long without checking up on them can be damaging to their morale and lead to passivity. That’s why you must ensure the team has all the guidance and support they need at all times – even when there’s no crisis.
Clarify roles
Every member of your team has his strengths and weaknesses. The roles you assign should show your understanding of this. Besides, accountability ensures that no one is left out and conflict is kept to a minimum.
Offer training support
You must offer growth opportunities in your organization. You can start by developing the skills of your employees and other learning opportunities. That can empower them and allow them to have confidence in themselves and their skills. Besides, it can help make up for talent deficiencies in your team and improve the total power of your organization.
2. Letting the Team Take the Credit
Just so you know, a lot of employees feel left out when their bosses take credit for their work. It can also make them feel disrespected, slighted, and robbed of what rightfully belongs to them. Plus, it undermines the transparency your company worked so hard to accomplish. What makes the situation worse is most managers take credit for a great performance and share the blame when things go south. Don’t be that guy.
Although your team’s responsibility falls on you, remembering it is teamwork can go a long way to help you gain mutual respect. Your ability to use others’ diverse talents and skills to achieve great results emphasizes your manager’s skills. Plus, you have a better chance of building trust with your team if you share the glory.
Next time you receive praise, remember to give rewards to your team and make it an open culture at your company and boost their morale. Appreciate them and let them know how much they mean for the company. It’s a win-win situation, and everyone in your team gets to be happy with high self-respect.
3. Communicate With Your Team Members
Communication is the key to everything in a business. It’s almost impossible to work with people you don’t communicate with at all. Plus, individual performances are not as great as teamwork. That’s why the sum of the whole is often higher than the sum of individuals. But that’s not all. The possibility of ineffective communication in your team breeding more issues is extremely high. If you have little to no opportunity to interact with your team, then multiple scenarios can occur.
First off, your teammates can become angry and confused when misunderstandings happen. Even when it’s easily fixable, the situation can agitate one or more team members leading to an ungovernable situation.
Secondly, blame games arise. When you are not interacting, you only see your strengths and other people’s weaknesses. There’s no common ground there. Conflict increases, and it becomes impossible to look at things from the other person’s perspective.
But there’s hope yet. Some of the tips that make communication possible for teams include active listening exercises. Make time to listen to your team and let them express their feelings.
Additionally, communicate directly, clearly, and consistently with your team. It doesn’t help to provide inaccurate information as that can make the team feel betrayed. Besides, transparency and honesty are important teamwork values and can increase compliance.
More importantly, don’t eat lunch by yourself. Unless you have a personal engagement, it won’t hurt to sit down with team members over lunch and just talk about everything but business. That personal level of group interactions is important for the success of any team.
Final thoughts
Increasing your team’s synergy may be just what you need for better productivity. With the tips offered above, you can build a team of hardworking and motivated individuals with shared values and turn that negative synergy into something better. Plus, they will be more likely to satisfy clients in a positive environment of teamwork.
Salman is a prolific environmental writer, and has authored more than 500 articles in reputed journals, magazines and websites. He is proactively engaged in creating mass awareness on renewable energy, waste management, sustainability and conservation all over the world.
Salman can be reached on salman@cleantechloops.com
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