How many of us think we have great teams? How many of us think we can build great team? 

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Unfortunately, great teams seem to be few and far between. What are the symptoms of not so great teams.

The symptoms that I have seen over the years are:

1. There is no trust and cooperation. You have to beg, borrow, steal, or threaten colleagues before they will help you
2. There is no camaraderie. There are either many cliques or everyone hates each other and they can’t wait to go home
3. There is no team. It’s just a group of people working in silos and working to their own agendas.

Essentially, we are working with a group of people, who frankly, can’t be bothered whether we lived or died.

The consequence is that nothing ever gets achieved.

We all know that in order to really thrive at work, we need to run highly effective teams. But how do we create these teams? Running great teams essentially boils down to running teams with great collaboration.

So how do we go about fostering collaboration? Do we just buy everyone beers and collaboration happens?

First we need to keep in mind that there are 2 types of collaboration.

1. Inter team – between teams
2. Intra team – within team

Why is this distinction important? I have seen leaders who only focus on intra-team collaboration and although they have the most awesome team, work still doesn’t get delivered at the project or organisational level.

The truth is, no team can succeed on their own. They need to work together with other teams. Teams are created to play a certain function or role. But these roles can never be successful by themselves.

A great example of inter-team collaboration is between the business and IT teams in a bank. I would bet all of us have bank accounts. And most, if not all of us, use the ATM and internet banking for all our banking needs. We rarely ever go into a branch anymore. Who wants to queue?

What if I were to tell you, without collaboration between IT and business, you won’t be able to enjoy those facilities? It simply won’t exist. IT could simply provide your customer service officers and tellers with a laptop, installed with Microsoft Excel and say, “Go for Gold”. Everything will be manual and you will either have to go to the bank every week and stand in line for the teller, or start shoving money under your mattress. Like the good old days!

What about intra-team collaboration? The best examples of these are in sports teams. It’s magical how some sports teams pull together during competitions. The teams with the highest level of intra-team collaboration will annihilate the opponents. We see this in team sports like soccer, basketball and volleyball, to name a few.

Teams that don’t fare so well are the ones with a STAR player. Usually these players only think about themselves and consider themselves better than and separate from the team. This attitude tears the team apart.

Do you have a STAR player in your team? Are they enhancing the team dynamics or destroying them? If it's the latter, I hope you take corrective action, before the team breaks apart.

So what can we do? In Part 2, we will discuss what we have to do to ensure that we run engaged and highly effective teams

Visit Empower Coaching page to find out more about Steph's work.

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