70% of employers think team collaboration is crucial for their success, but only 18% of employees get their yearly communication evaluation report. Can you imagine? Team collaboration is a popular term rarely seen in most companies.

86% of professionals believe that a company suffers losses due to dysfunctional team activities. Whether you are managing a team or a part of one, you should understand why a team succeeds and why not.

In this post, we are going to point out the reasons why a team fails to collaborate and how to improve team management to achieve sustainable growth.

So let’s get right into it.

Common reasons for a team failing to collaborate

When a group of individuals gathers around, builds a plan, and shares different responsibilities to achieve specific goals, you can call it team collaboration.

One of the major keys for a business to grow is turning its overall workforce into powerful teamwork. It sounds easy, but data shows us practically it’s a bigger challenge than it seems.

Suppose, a company recruits financial experts to maintain its financial activities. Despite having similar professional backgrounds, people possess different lifestyles, philosophies, or ideas. When they come to work with each other, inevitably words like ego, show-off, and disrespect come forward.

While you are managing a team, you should ask yourself these questions.

➔ Do you have people on your team who don’t respect each other?

➔ Have you met some of the team members who are too self-centered and try to step over others?

➔ Does your team member still doesn’t understand the value of team collaboration?

If the answer is YES, you are suffering through great team trouble and a lot more is waiting. If the answer is NO, you are on the right track, you just need to keep improving.

Beyond Yes or No, there’s an open field, where you have issues finding the right answer.

Things that hinder team performances

What are the issues that reduce your team’s performance? We will find about that in brief detail below.

Suppose you have a team just for the namesake. You don’t have any particular plan for collaboration. You have people with different roles. They are doing only what they are assigned for. But individuals aren’t working as a team. There’s too much communication gap to focus on a single thing.

You have plans to accomplish team goals. But dominant individuals are interfering with your decisions and getting you in the wrong direction. Other team members start to think that there’s a weakness in leadership.

Some of your team members believe they have more expertise, and they can help achieve your team goal by sole effort.

A dusty eco of disrespect and distrust making everything vague. No one is caring for anyone and is trying to gain personal resolution.

In such situations what should be your plan to recover?

Best team collaboration practice to follow

Here we are sharing the top 8 team collaboration best practices to generate an impeccable result.

Let everyone realize the goals of the company

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

Sylvia Plath

Without a strong cause, all of our efforts may go in vain. The same things can happen to your team. As a team manager, make sure that every team members know and realize the things they are doing.

It’s also a matter of transparency. When a team understands what they should do to achieve something rather than how much they should do to achieve many things, it brings two different results. The latter often fails a team to collaborate.

You should keep reminding the very cause the company has started its journey. You must keep reminding your team members how much it is to work as a team.

Inspire the team members to share expectations

A team functions through people performing different responsibilities. Each one should have a role to play.

For example, you are managing a content team for a literary magazine. One of your content writers is writing about a Psychoanalysis of Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint. And one of your designers is assigned to create an illustration for it.

If both of your teammates know when they should finish their respective tasks and discuss with each other to make the cooperation more effective, there’s a certainty that you will get perfect content, and the process will improve your team’s collaboration culture.

A team manager must inspire his team members to share what are they expecting from each other.

Find out the individual strength and empower to a different role

It’s a plus point for any company to gather people with diverse personalities. If all the team members know each other’s personality traits, they can set the bar of expectations. If something happens they would know whom to discuss the matters.

One of the best ways to learn the personality traits of your team members is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This indicator analyzes a person’s inner self by using four indicators sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking.

Every individual has their own area of expertise and a particular way to handle different situations. As a team manager, you need to find out the hidden strengths of your team members. Share it with everyone. Assign roles according to their strengths; you should inspire them and emphasize more than their weaknesses.

Establish the accountability of team performance

Accountability can increase your chances of achieving a specific goal to 95%. This means when you are assigned to a task, and you are committed to someone about this task and will accomplish it with a magic force.

Establishing accountability isn’t easy. Sometimes the human mind can indeed deliver more under pressure. But chances are if you put a lot of pressure upon your team members, it will deteriorate their creative force. No improvement is possible if such things happen.

But if you encourage them to share what they are doing, and exchange feedback, and constructive opinion, it will release the pressure and establish a sense of accountability.

Besides, you should insist more on team performance than individual performance. If everyone is accountable to one another, eventually you will see how your team getting closer to achieving goals each day.

Inspire innovation and creativity

The secret behind team growth is innovation and creativity. If your team doesn’t have room for ‘thinking beyond the bushes’ of rules and productivity, it’s a bad sign. Bad sign for what? New ideas will stop flourishing, you will apply the same growth technique over and over again but end up with similar results every time.

Global human resource organization Robert Half points out some of the actionable tips on how to increase innovation and creativity. They insist on-

• Giving your employees a reason to care.
• Allow individual team players to make decisions.
• Initiate participation in making decisions.
• As a team leader, set an example for others, etc.

Besides that, you can always find your hacks and ask for suggestions from your team members to create a more open atmosphere.

Teams day out is essential

It’s always helpful to get out of your day-to-day work. Getting out of the office with your team is a powerful way to create effective team bonding.

In the workplace, people maintain a professional approach to collaboration. But when you take your team to socialize in a more flexible place (it could be a dining party or tour to distant places), the professional barrier flattens. It helps the team members learn and understand each other personally.

This practice is essential to establish humane connectivity among teammates. When people consider their colleagues more than co-workers and try to understand things personally, it evolves into great team collaboration.

Implement team management technology

Implementing project management technology is one of the best ways to improve team collaboration. A project management tool can help you create shareable projects, assign people, add task lists, open discussion threads, and many more things in one place.

It also works as a data source. Team members can monitor each other’s activities, ask questions, and put opinions on different projects at a time. There are a lot of team collaboration tools to empower your team management. We have been using WP Project Manager for a long time. You can get help from project management tools like Trello, Basecamp, or Asana.

To save time, and get connected with your team, create a continuous flow of team combination, it’s a wiser decision to adopt a project management tool.

Inspire them to tell their stories, celebrate team success, and rewards

Telling stories is one of the ancient practices of human beings. People love to tell stories, and they have an unfathomable thirst to listen to stories.

While working, inspire everyone to tell their tale. You can initiate this practice by asking several questions.

• How do they feel when working with the team?
• Which personal obstacles did they face to ask someone for help?
• How are they solving a problem through cooperation?
  Let your team members exchange these answers. It will guide them to build trust and enthusiasm.

The next thing is to measure the success of your team’s efforts, keep celebrating the team’s success, and let your team players know that they are doing great.

When you create communication evaluation and performance appraisal, highlight the team collaboration as a pinpoint.

Wrapping up

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

Booker T. Washington

We believe you heard this quote from famous political advisor Booker T. Washington.

Team collaboration is all about supporting each other to achieve something that helps a business grow simultaneously.

So what do you think? Have you already started rethinking your team collaboration strategies?

If you have any then do share your team-building and effective collaboration stories in the comment section below.