If you are running your own business or are in charge of a team, it might be difficult to get everyone to give it their all and improve overall teamwork. However, this isn’t impossible. There are things you can do to help motivate your team and get the results that you want. Here’s advice on how to accomplish this.
Ways to Improve Teamwork
Consider these techniques when you are attempting to improve collaboration within your company. You can learn more about teamwork through advice articles on BetterHelp aimed to help you become a better team member, navigate conflict, and any other specific issues related to teamwork.
- Get to Know Your Team. When you are managing a group, you will need to know who your team is right away. This can help you understand who you are working with and which members you will be able to count on. Besides that, they need to learn about you as well. Give them a chance to put their trust in you and you may see that they want to do a good job.
- Listen to Your Employees. Even though you are the owner or manager of a company, this doesn’t mean that you know everything there is to know. If one of your team members is saying that something isn’t working the way it should or that the project will take more time, put yourself in their shoes. Think about what can be done to help them and if you need to be more realistic in terms of what you expect from them. Try your best not to discount what they are saying and instead, hear out their concerns.
- Play to Their Strengths. After you have taken the time to get to know the people that work for you, this may offer you a chance to see what they can excel at. For instance, if one of your workers is skilled at numbers, perhaps they should be in charge of the spreadsheets and keeping the receipts for a project in order. Each person is likely to be good at certain things but needs more practice with others. It may behoove you to determine where their strengths lie, so you can utilize their skills effectively.
- Offer Incentives. You may also want to offer incentives to your employees when you need to have a project completed in a specific manner of time. This can be something monetary or providing a day off for a job well done. You might want to ask them what they would prefer as a reward after a project or talk to other managers you know to see what has worked for their particular team.
- Always Be Ready to Adjust Plans and Goals. You should keep in mind that your team will let you down sometimes, even if they don’t mean to. Things will go wrong, and technology will fail. These are instances that may be next to impossible to avoid. For this reason, you should be able to pivot when you need to and find additional solutions to problems when they arise. For instance, ask your team to save their files to your cloud server or onto an external hard drive, so if a computer breaks, all the information will still be available to the team.
- Be Genuine at All Times. A team may not want to do their best job if they can tell that you don’t care about them as individuals. Make sure that you are being genuine with them and providing praise when they do a good job. If you are giving a team only negative feedback, this may leave them feeling like you won’t notice when they are doing their best.
- Stay Positive. It might take a bit of time to get your team to work well together. Different employees may have been there longer, and others are still learning. Give them the time they need to complete projects together and make sure you are keeping an eye on the progress. Have an open mind about this and try to stay positive.
How Counseling Can Help
When the techniques you are utilizing are simply not working and you don’t know what else to do, you may want to work with a counselor to find out what else can be done. They may be able to help you look at the situation differently or assist you in addressing why your team may not be thriving under your leadership. Keeping a team on task and working well together is not something that has a one size fits all approach, so you don’t have to feel like you have failed if you don’t know what else should be done. It might take a lot of effort and patience. At the same time, you can learn new approaches and keep going.
Overview
You can improve teamwork with your team or company, but you will have to take a proactive approach. There’s no reason to expect your team to trust you and do their best if you aren’t showing them that you value them as workers. Be genuine, listen to their concerns, and make changes when necessary. These adjustments might allow you to see an increase in productivity and teamwork.
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