How to Work Together
By Evelyn Jackson (CEO & Creative Director)
In a world where we seldom come together, how do we work as a team that can ‘win’?
Successful leaders everywhere have always focused on building a winning team. And that is not all. In some cases, winning has taken priority over building sustainable businesses in the long term. While previously leaders wondered if everyone in their team has the ‘winning mentality’, today, leaders are more concerned with how to even get the team together to collectively work AND win.
The reality is that working together now requires us to foster a sense of team, even if we are seldom together in an ‘office’ of sorts.
Building and fostering a ‘real’ team requires thought, purpose, actions, and role modelling. In business, people are generally brought together because they have skills or expertise required, with a common direction from a leader. It is rare, although gaining more appetite, to bring teams together because they represent diversity and work together because of their skills, qualities, experience, life situation, backgrounds, values, and beliefs. Yet it is only by ensuring a group of individuals do in fact work together despite their individuality that can enable businesses to foster teams that reach for great results and ultimately win.
Next time you are looking for a new team member, think about the composition of the team and the requirements of the team, rather than merely the skills you are replacing or adding because you have the budget.
How to work together?
Building teams together more meaningfully is step number one.
A sense of purpose for a team is step number two.
Working together is no longer about the weekly face to face meeting or even the 10 minutes check in via teams. Working together is about the alignment that individuals gain from adopting their organisation’s purpose and how they work together as a result.
As a team member with a sense of purpose for not only what I do but how that complements others and the organisation’s purpose, I am able to contribute more effectively, I am able to challenge in the right way, I am able to build on other people’s ideas and show flexibility to how we work together.
Creating team collaboration in this way through a sense of purpose now critical to motivation for discretionary effort.
What does bringing the team together mean for your team? The HOW may have changed, but the WHY remains the same.
This is step number three. Bring the team together and facilitate deeper connections and greater understanding of each other.
How well do they know each other? How well do they support each other? Make them talk and discuss each other’s work problems, share as much as they can about their work, what they do, how they do it and why they believe it is important. Importantly too, recognise everyone’s contribution equally.
Bring it back to basics. Role model what it’s like to be a team member. And remember that people mostly care about other people.
No one starts a job wanting to fail, either for themselves, the business or for those around them. Leveraging these qualities in humanity is a way to continue to win despite how we work together today.
Foster real teams and winning will follow.