One of the best ways to avoid difficult scenarios all together is by making sure that your teams work creatively and effectively and that they're truly together. It sounds great. So how do you achieve this? Simply put, the best way to achieve it in the first place is to hire the right people to create the right team. Picking the right person for the right job is not simply a matter of experience and qualifications. There are other factors to consider.
Is the man or woman, a real team player or do they like to go it alone individually who like to go it alone are valuable sometimes. But when you have a team, even a very simple team, you can get much more out of a combination of everyone's skills. Working together. It's very helpful if anyone joining your team has very similar goals and work ethics to you and your organization. In this way, they will fit into the team naturally. They will be friendly and outgoing and want to help each other.
One of the most important ways to encourage teamwork is to foster trust. Trust between people on a team is very, very important. Remember the example I gave about the military, sacrificing even their lives for the for each other? This is because each member of the team a military team know that their colleague would do exactly To the same for them. You don't necessarily have to be best friends with someone on your team. But it does happen.
As long as you know that you can trust them, you know that they have your back in a very difficult situation. It's not really necessary or advisable to have false trust exercises to try to build this kind of feeling between team members. They really don't work. But simply by putting the team into real life situations where they need to work together will help build this trust. And you encourage open communication and generally a feeling of openness between all team members. Try to get them to know each other personally to some extent, so that they're invested in the well being of the other person.
Earlier we said that it's really not a good idea to give incentives or rewards to individuals on the same team. It's not a good idea because it fosters competition. And it helps people to move into a mindset where they can easily step on their colleagues. It is possible to give incentives but not for the individual. Give goals for the whole team. Put the numbers of sales upon a board, or better yet have a customer satisfaction score.
This can help to remind your team why they are there, and to work together towards this common objective. Giving individual team members the opportunity to work on their own parts of the project within the greater project gives them a chance to show their skills and also to gain credit for good work done. This will help to motivate them and to help their fellow teammates. One thing to avoid is allowing smaller cliques within the main group, such as the smokers clique, or elitist clique. While your team will naturally be formed from smaller subsets, cliques can be destructive due to the principles of convergence and divergence, which will make these subsets view themselves more like outsiders rather than members of your team. solve this by breaking up destructive cliques or subgroups by changing around the seating or arranging different groups to work with a different set of people.
Teamwork between different departments is perhaps is even more important than the team work within your own small group. It's important that you move groups around to work with different people from within your own department and elsewhere within the organization. For example, if someone from sales spends a few days with a marketing team, they will gain understanding and develop more respect for the role of that function within the organization.