The Sound of Inbox Silence

Team Talk (and action)

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been looking at how our ability to be a great team member is degrading and what to do about it. But if you run a team, what should you do differently to drive the right behaviors?

There is no one right answer, as every manager has their own management style that works best for them, their team, and their company culture. But, whatever your management style, you need to model and encourage a set of consistent behaviors that clarifies that the team is the forefront of everything you do.

What types of behaviors? Here are some examples we’ve explicitly seen work well.

• Direct modelling by collaborating with other managers, and developing a more collaborative style with your own team.
• Shifting rewards towards team results, and away from individual effort. For example, we’ve seen situations where team results make up 75% of a bonus and individual results 25%).
• Reconsidering what you mean by “results”. For example, a team may do terrific work for a year, but not make an economic number because of a change in the organization’s priorities. If you adjust for the change and reward your team appropriately, you can strengthen team cohesion. If you don’t do this, you may fracture the team.
• Creating rewards that employees can award to their colleagues for great collaborative behavior. These could be on-the-spot awards, but they will have extra impact if you announce the winners in a more public forum.
• Setting concrete requirements around behaviors that help the team perform. For example, you might require that team members create all content that is not restricted on a shared content management system like Notion or SharePoint and that they share it openly.
• Not rewarding behaviors that are counter to the team ethic. For example, you might have a team member who unexpectedly “goes dark” for days or weeks, only to pull some terrific work out of the hat for maximum dramatic impact. The work product might be deserving of a reward, but the method does not.
• Providing an infrastructure that makes it really easy to collaborate synchronously and asynchronously. A lot of collaboration software looks very similar in terms of features, but in some collaborative work is a breeze, and in others it’s much harder.
• Training your team in effective collaboration. As I’ve been discussing over the last few weeks, this muscle is degrading as organizations become more distributed. So, team members will need help.