Your team is a perpetual work in progress. There are so many facets that contribute to the way a team functions, in addition to the fact that teams are made up of people, and people are not only complex, but also changing as they learn, develop and age. And yet, there are a few skills that you can help your team develop that will help them as individuals, as well as a team. Here are seven skills you can help your team develop.
Communication
Communication is an essential skill for effective teamwork. Communication is also such a broad topic encompassing verbal, non-verbal and written forms.
It is important for a team to be able to communicate their thoughts, their ideas, their feelings, to be able to support each other through success and failures, through times when team members are experiencing tough times personally, and to teach each other skills and knowledge. It is a pretty big ask for a group of people to come together and be able to do all of it effectively, and yet somehow we do expect it of them.
Effective communication skills take time to develop. Very few people are naturally gifted at communication, and teams often need both time and coaching to develop the skills. Time, because people need time together to learn their individual ways of expressing themselves, but also coaching to learn, as a group, how they can best communicate. Individuals also need time to learn and develop effective communication skills.
There are some ways to aid the development of these skills. If you’re finding that the people in the team have trouble explaining issues, and find that they seem to go around in circles without every explaining the background, the current situation, the customer impact, and so on, then there are frameworks that you can teach the team to practice and use. An example of this is the Situation, Complication, Resolution framework.
For team communications, where you need to make sure everyone has the opportunity to present their ideas, Liberating Structures have some good facilitation techniques you can use, such as 1-2-4-ALL.
Conflict Resolution
Conflicts, disagreements, and even blaming can arise at various times in a team, and are almost inevitable. In facts, the ‘storming’ phase of Tuckman’s stages of group development is a recognised and essential period of disagreement and conflict that arises after the initial ‘forming’ stage of familiarisation and excitement. This stage is necessary as the team learns to establish norms and boundaries, and limitations on their current abilities as well. This stage in a teams development should not be avoided, but it requires someone in the team to know this, recognise it, and encourage the team to learn to handle the conflicts rather than avoid them.
Conflicts also arise when the team is under stress, when a tough decision needs to be made, or when a team member is causing issues for the team. Personality clashes are another common source – and these may not surface during the storming stage, but at any time.
It is important for the team to understand that it is completely normally for them to experience conflict. The important point though is that they are able to handle it effectively as individuals and as a team. As individuals, it is important each of the team members are able to assertively state their point of view, to handle feedback from the team on their work, to provide constructive feedback for the others in the team, and to regulate their emotions when conflicts do arise. As a team, it is important for them to recogise that conflict is normal, that the members of the team need to follow the establish team rules or working agreement, and to ensure that each team member has the opportunity to speak up, and in turn be treated with respect, regardless of the situation.
As a team, the team coach should ensure that they are aware of the various stages of team development. The team should, as a group, be coached into encouraging respectful conflict as a way of developing a closer, trusting, working relationship. If you are sure that each team member is able to fearlessly expressing their honest point of view, you are in a far better position to make decisions and be sure that you have the information you need, that the team is able to make the best decision based on the information it has, and that no-one will feel pushed aside.
For individuals, it is important that the more outspoken team members learn to make space for the less assertive in the team. Each team member’s contribution is important, and in the heat of the moment of a conflict, they may shy away out of discomfort. Encourage them to speak up, even in these situations, especially in these situations. Quite often they have the coolest heads, and are able to be the most analytical under stress.
Listening
The ability to actively listen to your colleagues is a skill worth developing, and believe it or not, it usually does need developing. Listen to your colleagues to learn, to understand, and not to respond. Show you are listening by paraphrasing their words to first ensure you have understood them, and also to show you have listened to them. This goes a long way to building a good rapport with them, earning their respect and building trust.
If you have some people in the team who consistently seem to listen only to respond (or don’t seem to be listening at all before insisting on their point of view), one exercise to try with the team is to have a discussion on a topic, but before a person gets to give their point of view, they must reiterate what the previous person said. The previous person must also confirm that it is correct. Only then can the next person give their input.
Decision Making
Achieving a happy consensus in a team can be difficult. There are often opposing points of view, or diverging approaches. There may be insufficient information available to make a comfortable decision. A brainstorming session may produce more questions than answers and expose too many options to sift through.
There are some approaches that team and their leaders can take to come to a decision – they might not always be comfortable with it (especially if a lot of the information is not available), but coming to an agreement on a course of action is possible. What approach the team should take depends greatly on the circumstances. For example firefighting teams have very different timeframe in which to decide a course of action to a software team deciding on how to fix a bug in the software.
I really like this article at First Round on decision making because it talks about categorising decisions (reversible versus irreversible for example), ensuring the decisions are being made at the right level of delegation authority, and working out whether the time you’re spending on decisions is actually worth it.
For a team or an individual that needs to make a decision, a simple way is to consider the following:
- What is the problem, conditions, symptoms, and what decision needs to be made. What data exists that is relevant to the problem?
- What options are there?
- What are the costs of implementing each of the options?
- What are some potential positive and negative impacts of implementing each of the options?
Now as an individual skill, if you’re able to consider the above, and reach a decision then that is a valuable skill. As a team skill, if an individual can contribute to the team through these steps, then that is fantastic. Bonus points if you’re able to guide the team through it!
Problem Solving
If you’re setting out to solve a problem, make sure you’re solving the right problem!
Problem-solving is a pretty broad area, but there are some common ways to tackle different sorts of problems. The skill here for individuals and teams is to identify the problem, the root cause of the problem, and then how to solve the problem.
Problems can take various forms. A problem might be a bug in the software your team develops. It could be a gap in a process that is causing errors to slip through. It could be different, such as ill-defined roles that causes confusion and conflicts. It could also be an opportunity, such as a ‘problem’ that is actually a gap in the market that your organisation can exploit.
The first step is always to identify the problem. Not the symptoms of the problem, but the actual problem. For example if your system has an outage that appears to be due to a software error, it might actually be the case that the software error was due to an incorrect unit test case, which in turn was due to insufficient or incorrect requirements, which occurred because the product owner was too busy to provide adequate answers to the software development team. Why was the PO too busy? If you keep digging, you might find the root cause and avoid the same situation happening again. A technique called the 5 Whys is helpful here.
When the problem you’re trying to solve is product-related, techniques from design thinking help (in fact they are designed for it!). I’ve completed a certification from the Luma Institute, and I really like their techniques. Abstraction Laddering is a useful tool for defining the Problem Statement that can help you move on to solving the problem.
Once you’ve identified the problem, you need to design the solution. This might be clear, but sometimes it is not. Going back to our overloaded product owner, there might be myriad of reason why they are so busy. It could be that the PO and their manager can sort out their workload and give them more headspace to focus on fewer things. But you might need more than that – you might need to pull the group of POs together and facilitate a group session to identify all the tasks expected of POs and reassign them.
For product-related problems, once you’ve identified the actual problem to be solved, you can set about designing a product to solve the problem. Again, design thinking helps here.
Read: https://www.sessionlab.com/blog/design-thinking-online-tools/
Reliability
The best team players consistently brings their best everyday. They turn up on time, do their work on time to the best of their ability, and are always there to help others. How can you help everyone in your team develop the same level of reliability? By helping them with the following:
- Developing your craft: Learn the skills you need to do your job, continuously learn and expand your knowledge. In many fields this is a must just to keep your skills relevant. There are so many options available now to keep developing, such as YouTube, Moocs, bookings, online learning providers such as Pluralsight for IT skills, and of course blogs like this one. Keep learning and expanding your skills and knowledge. Always try and apply your knowledge, and do your best in each task. Seek feedback from people you respect.
- Deliver on your commitments: If you say yes to doing something, then do it on time. Learn to say no, or at least learn to question things before committing to doing something. Manage your time so you are able to progress tasks over time, and not always struggling to complete things at the last minute. If you realise that you will not be able to complete something when you committed to getting it done, then speak to the other person as soon as you realise, explain why, and commit to another date. If you have competing priorities, then ask your manager which is the higher priority.
- Communication: Don’t be the one that everyone is always chasing for updates, or checking that you have read their email. If you can’t respond to important emails is a reasonable amount of time, then reply to the email and let the sender know when you will be able to respond. This goes a long way to building the perception of reliability having things under control, and building trust.
- Respect your time, and others. Don’t consistently turn up late to work, late to meetings. If you’re invited to a meeting, respond to the invitation and let them know whether you can or can’t make it. If you need it to be reschedule, suggestion another time.
- Being truthful: If you’re asked questions, especially about a mistake you’ve made, or a piece of work you’ve done, then always answer truthfully.
Respectfulness
Teams are made up of all sorts of people, and in fact better teams are made up of people of different ages, backgrounds and skills. The team is better for the mix. But, at all times, even when team members strong disagree with each other, they need to be respectful. If they cannot be respectful, then trust and cohesion can quickly be destroyed, arguments can arise and factions develop. Conversely, if team members can be respectful to each other, even in the most heated debates, trust can be strengthened and openness can develop, which leads to an even more effective team.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
