Cultivating Team Effectiveness in a New Paradigm
At our core, we view teams as essential communities where individuals can learn, grow, heal, connect, belong, and thrive. By coming together, teams can overcome challenges and celebrate successes, ultimately creating a greater impact on the world.
To serve leaders and their teams, we created our Team Effectiveness Model a few years ago. The model is aimed to help teams explore the conditions necessary for cultivating team effectiveness. It highlights how the interplay between Clarity, Trust, and Impact fosters alignment, cohesion, and resilience within a team.
Traditionally, teams were seen as intact, closed systems with a clear purpose and shared goals, where effectiveness could be controlled by a hands-on committed leader. However, teams of today are increasingly formed with members from multiple areas, shifting in and out of the team, often working remotely and relying heavily on technology to complete a variety of tasks. Their operating context, roles, and responsibilities are also increasingly emergent and dynamic, requiring teams to view and hold their boundaries as a team more lightly. In this month's blog series, we explore how to cultivate team effectiveness in this new paradigm through the lenses of Clarity, Trust and Impact.
Co-Creating Team Clarity
At its core, a team is more likely to connect and commit to an organisation when they have clarity of its strategic direction and higher purpose. Knowing how their collective contributions fit into the bigger picture is crucial for a team’s motivation and performance. Plus, having a shared understanding of team goals, roles, and responsibilities helps keep things aligned and avoids duplications, gaps, and surprises.
However, treating clarity as certainty can be problematic as certainty isn't always possible. The real opportunity here is to build the team's ability to create clarity together in a flexible way, trying out different mindsets, behaviours, and practices that best support team clarity. Encouraging ongoing meaning making through conversations with both team members and external stakeholders ensures this clarity includes multiple perspectives and is broad enough to assess what is needed at this point in time, appreciating the everchanging context in which we are all operating.
Here are some practical strategies we’ve seen leaders and their teams use to co-create clarity, stay focused and reduce anxiety through uncertainty:
Sharing Responsibility for Clarity - By fostering a mindset of shared responsibility by encouraging everyone in the team to pitch in and keep each other informed about what is known, what is unknown, and the steps being taken to gather information or discover more through experimentations. This includes having everyone connect the dots, ask questions, express concerns, and share ideas.
Fostering a Mindset of Adaptability - By enabling the team to set short-term goals and prioritise critical tasks in the absence of along-term plan. This entails encouraging the team to co-create adaptable goals capable of adjusting to meet changing circumstances or anticipating different scenarios through contingency plans, thereby reducing uncertainty about potential future events. Additionally, focusing on work within the team's control and influence helps build resilience.
Recognising Evolving Roles and Responsibilities - By supporting team members in recognising and working more flexibly with the ambiguous and emergent nature of their roles and encouraging ongoing conversations among themselves and critical stakeholders. Teams can then move away from static position descriptions and performance plans, experimenting with more dynamic documentation of roles and responsibilities.
Cultivating a Learning Mindset - By encouraging continuous learning, curiosity, openness and approaching uncertainty with a problem-solving attitude. When team members are committed to continuous learning, they can better understand the evolving context, connect the dots more effectively, and contribute to creating a clearer picture for everyone. This continuous cycle of learning and adapting helps the team maintain clarity, even in dynamic and uncertain environments.
Effective Leadership in Creating Clarity
Leaders who empower their teams to co-create clarity maintain a steady presence by being accessible, visible, and engaged. They demonstrate open-mindedness, curiosity, and flexibility while showing empathy, providing support, and recognising the challenges that uncertainty brings. These leaders foster a sense of ownership and confidence, enabling the team to navigate uncertainty with more resilience and clarity.
We invite your reflection as you lead your team:
- In what ways can you foster shared responsibility for clarity among your team members?
- What strategies can you implement with your team to co-create adaptable goals that meet changing circumstances?
- What ongoing conversations can you facilitate to keep roles and responsibilities dynamic and relevant?
- How can you encourage continuous learning, curiosity, and openness within your team?
Join us next week, as we continue to explore how to cultivate team effectiveness in this new paradigm through the lens of Trust.
