
Creating and maintaining efficient and effective teams is central to any business success. In the course of planning and implementing our team building programs, we have the unique opportunity to chat to team leaders and decision makers every day about the challenges their teams are facing.
Businesses and organisations come to us because they need to strengthen their teams and are facing difficulties maintaining the high-functioning organizational units they need.
The following are the 3 areas that we have noticed are providing the greatest challenges to effective teams in 2022:
Communication
Communication in the modern era prior to covid was always a big challenge for groups and teams. With the proliferation of modern methods of communication such as WhatsApp and email, individuals within teams were increasingly battling to find ‘rapport’ (a meeting of minds) while avoiding the tough face to face (or even voice to voice – remember the telephone?) conversations that are essential to proper planning and resolution of issues in teams.
This has been exacerbated by the pandemic, many of our clients feel their staff have become even more insular and ‘independent’, relying more than ever on communicating at a distance and avoiding meetings.
This is a big challenge and interventions to ensure teams interact on a more human level should be encouraged.
Our Tip:
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Our Tip:
Schedule at least one face to face meeting for your team each week. Virtual meetings are efficient and have become the default place to connect for many organisations but ensure your team comes together in a real physical environment regularly.
Resilience
Resilience is defined by the American Psychological Association as ‘the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands’.
Resilience has become a hot topic in organisations recently and we are hearing this word brought up increasingly in meetings with clients.
There is some irony here. For many of us we have become tougher through lockdown. We have had to cope with ideas and paradigms that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
Why are we having resilience issues in our businesses then?
I think that the answer may lie in the fact that we have learned to be resilient outside of our traditional group environments and returning to work we are having to learn resilience in the team framework all over again. Teams and organizational structures were places where we sought out support and affirmation. We are having to learn this all over again.
Whatever the cause, resilience has become a major stumbling block for anyone looking to improve team effectiveness.
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Our Tip:
Cohesion
The final major challenge for teams that we are seeing is lack of Cohesion. Cohesion can be defined as ‘the action or fact of forming a united whole’. Effective cohesion is a potentially powerful driver of success.
In the organizational context perhaps this can be described as the value people place on belonging to a group or team. Our clients are finding that the bonds that bind individuals within their teams have been weakened and as a result those teams themselves have become weaker.
The warm fuzzy feeling we have when a group of people are closely connected has become less common. The perceived value of being part of a team seems to have somehow been diminished.
Why? Again this may just be a result of spending so much time out of our regular work environment.
The desire for cohesion is a basic human need and should be addressed by leaders in all organisations.
Teams need to ensure that they do everything possible to increase their effectiveness and efficiency. High functioning teams are the life blood of any high functioning organisation. Recovering from setbacks in your organsiation starts with identifying the specific challenges you are facing.
Our Tip:
Clearly communicated goals can be a great way to increase cohesion. Leaders in any organisation must ensure that their team understands and buys into any goals set by the organisation and understands and sees ‘the bigger picture’ in any situation.