Got shareholders? In a business partnership? Want to build a management team? Have interdepartmental meetings and strategic meetings that leave you shaking your head? You need Team Cohesion. But how do you get it?
We’ve all been on teams that can move mountains and some that never seem to get out of a meeting without some animosity or where nothing was accomplished. What makes the difference?
It’s not one thing, it’s a collection of things that produce the alchemy, the cohesion you want.
- 1. You all know and respect each other’s strengths.
- 2. You all know the attitude and communication habits that are self-defeating and how to change the habit in the moment.
- 3. You set your desired end result before launching into the meeting or conversation.
- 4. You use context to set the stage for your topic before adding your idea or changing the subject.
- 5. You practice active listening, which demonstrates that you know what the other person is saying by paraphrasing, using questions to better understand the concept and reframing what you thought you heard, before you speak on your topic.
- 6. You know the hidden traps that grab hold of team culture and can easily remind everyone so they step away from the trap, in the next moment, without ensuing conflict.
- 7. You hold mutual respect and admiration for each other by trusting the other is capable and competent.
- 8. You use open questions to explore your assumptions and put your expectations on the table to see if they are accurate and can be met. You then dump the assumptions that are inaccurate and refine your expectations to what is possible and likely.
- 9. When you disagree, you explore the disagreement to get all the interests on the table, rather than knocking an opposing idea off the table in a battle to see who wins. You state your concerns, rather than attack the idea or the person.
All these are easy to learn skills that turn a group of people into a high performing team. Your company then has the necessary structure to scale into a network of teams, which builds an interdependent set of partnerships that allows the company to grow.
Spirit West has built a suite of tools to manage all these challenges so that you and your teams function at a level that builds a culture you love to manage and is hard to compete with.
