Lucy McGibbon, Director of Teamscapes Learning, explores what it takes to be a great team.
A team is a collection of individuals working effectively together to achieve a common goal, whether they’re sharing the same location or working remotely.
Having a ‘common goal’ is vital. Without it, a team’s members are nothing more than a group of people.
Communication lies at the heart of all human interaction. Successful teams use communication positively to embrace their differences and channel conflict to inspire creativity and change.
Ineffective teams do the opposite. Lack of clarity can bring about confusion, making it difficult for team members to collaborate effectively. Clashes over roles and struggles for power can become negative forces and a team’s overall objectives can often get lost within all the drama. For businesses, such negativity impacts the bottom line and, for individuals, the effects can trigger demotivation, low confidence, low creativity, feelings of exclusion, resentment and even depression.
In effective teams, individuals flex and move naturally, playing to each other’s strengths, interchanging roles of responsibility as tasks and skills dictate, in order to achieve a common goal.
At Teamscapes, we talk about an ‘upward spiral of learning’. This happens when individuals are aligned to look in the same direction, combining their strengths and energies to get the very best out of each other. Part of the learning process is appreciating the role that self-awareness and mutual respect play in achieving team balance. It’s in this balance that the magic lies.
For the magic to happen, people need to experience how it feels. At Teamscapes, we use team development activities, strategies and team building exercises to bring the process of self-discovery to life by enabling individuals to learn through doing.
Teams that are empowered to work well together can achieve a wide range of positive outputs.
Lucy McGibbon is Director of Teamscapes Learning, with over 25 years experience in people development. She is dedicated to enlightening people to change.