by John Reid, Consultant, Mediator
The Reid Group

It’s generally accepted that effective teams accomplish more than Lone Rangers. And after all, even the Lone Ranger had Tonto. All of us do better when we combine our work with the good work of others.

Many examples come to mind illustrating the importance of teamwork. Symphonies create beautiful music together when they create a sound as a team that no single instrument could create alone. If only the drums or violin or trumpet plays, the music is not as powerful. In baseball, no team would be successful is everyone wanted to pitch, catch or play first base. A strong baseball team needs nine good hitters and nine fielders in different positions working in harmony to succeed.

There are a few “secret ingredients” to building effective teams. Here are The Reid Group’s top five:

1. A shared understanding that an effective team is more than a collection of individuals. Rather, a team is a group of people with shared purposes, clear roles and common, mutually-agreed-upon expectations.

2. One way to enhance the success of a team is by spending regular and consistent time focusing on the success of individual team members. This requires a “both/and” perspective: both how is the team doing overall in achieving its goals and how is the team helping individuals to achieve their personal goals.

3. As organizational consultant Peter Senge has said, “A fundamental characteristic of the relatively unaligned team is wasted energy.” Effective teams evaluate their alignment with the organization’s mission and values as well as with expressed roles and expectations on a regular basis to ensure alignment and minimize wasted energy.

4. In order to maximize the team’s success, it’s important to be mindful of Stephen Covey’s conviction that there are two bottom lines to success of any team: a) promoting and enhancing relationships and b) accomplishing results. Only by paying attention to both are teams successful.

5. As with any other worthwhile endeavor, effective teams require significant commitment to work through conflicts and respond well to the inevitable struggles the arise within the team. One way to address these struggles is to recognize that the best way to access the individual’s or team’s strengths is to try to meet some of their basic needs. A useful activity involves two or more people on the team sharing their best understanding of what they need more or less of in the team relationship to develop better outcomes.

At The Reid Group, we recently spent several days on retreat to examine some of our team dynamics in order to work together more effectively. What are some of the things you do to enhance your team dynamics? Post your comments here to join the discussion.