A team is not a group of individuals. That’s right, a team is more than just its members. It is also the systems, knowledge, and shared connections between them.
A team that nurtures these systems, actively shares knowledge, and strengthens connections is cohesive, and therefore, effective.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss cohesion and how you can build a cohesive team.
Team Cohesion: Strategies to Boost Workplace Performance
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat is Team Cohesion?
Team cohesion is the team’s ability to function as a single unit and work together. It is the totality of intangible connections, positive relationships, and mutual understanding of the team members.
Team cohesion is characterized by the following.
- Multi-dimensional: The professional, behavioral, and emotional relationships between the members of the team
- Dynamic: Fluid and evolves with every change, like the leaving of a team member or the joining of a new one
- Collective: Sum of all interpersonal relationships within the team; a wedge between any two people can affect the whole team
- Business-aligned: Focused on the business goals and working towards a common pupose
- Organizational: Depends on the organization, its structures, culture, values, and leadership behavior
Unlike commonly understood metrics, such as efficiency or productivity, team cohesion is an emerging concept that is gaining popularity, especially in service organizations. Here’s why.
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe Importance of Team Cohesion
A team’s ability to work cohesively is the foundation of business success, which is why it’s critical. Team cohesion also lends itself to several other benefits.
Team efficiency
A cohesive team is organized and productive. Team members actively eliminate redundancies and waste of time or effort. They save unnecessary costs and optimize team effectiveness.
Goal orientation
Team cohesiveness helps in achieving individual and collective goals. They understand their roles and responsibilities. Their measures of success are clearly defined, and they know how to achieve them. With a focus on goals, cohesive teams improve work performance.
Team autonomy
A cohesive team is transparent, empowering each team member to be autonomous and creative. So, the entire team has the context to solve problems innovatively.
On the other hand, the manager simply gives direction and support rather than micromanagement. This creates a positive work culture, also freeing managerial time in the process.
Employee engagement
When a team is cohesive, they’re also actively engaged. Each individual feels a strong sense of belonging to the team and the company. They are aligned with the organization’s purpose and motivated to work towards it. This improves team performance.
Healthy work environment
Cohesiveness supports effective team collaboration. A cohesive team is supportive of one another. They work more closely, offering help and advice to those struggling. They take collective responsibility and deliver as a unit.
As a corollary, poor team cohesion can have negative consequences, such as not achieving goals, delays in project delivery, high attrition, low job satisfaction, etc.
To prevent poor group cohesion, you first need to learn to identify it. Here are some pointers.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Identify Poor Team Cohesion
If you’re worried that your team isn’t working cohesively but are not sure what the problem is, below are some telltale signs to look for.
Unresolved conflicts: Are team members getting into conflicts that are not being resolved professionally? If these conflicts become resentment or become personal, your team has poor cohesion.
Lack of transparency: In a team that is not cohesive, individuals are prone to speaking unclearly or withholding information. When team members don’t share information proactively and openly, there might be some underlying insecurity or unhealthy competition that you need to resolve.
Blame game: A team that is not cohesive tends to blame each other for shortcomings. Team members might not take personal responsibility when things go wrong.
Unengaged team members: You’ll notice in meetings that group members aren’t offering their best ideas or doing the bare minimum. They might not feel inclined to collaborate or innovate.
Lack of trust: A team that is not cohesive is always watching out for problems and feels the need to protect themselves.
Strong team cohesiveness looks quite the opposite.
Summarize this article for me pleaseSigns of Strong Team Cohesion
Every cohesive team need not be a tiger team. But they need to show signs of working effectively together. Here are some signs you must look for.
Strong communication
Clear and active communication is the foundation of team cohesion. This manifests in various ways, such as team members:
- Sharing information and acknowledging challenges without fear
- Confidently speaking to each other face to face or putting their opinion in writing over email/Slack
- Comfortably having difficult conversations or heated debates in the interest of the project
- Speaking up and sharing opinions without fear of repercussions
- Actively documenting progress and willing to hand off tasks, if necessary
Quick conflict resolution
Cohesive teams are not devoid of conflicts; they just resolve them quickly and healthily. They are welcoming of diverse opinions and disagreements. When a debate turns into a conflict, they resolve it among themselves and move past it.
Commitment to decisions
‘Disagree but commit’ is a crucial motto of a cohesive team. When one or two team members disagree with a decision, they will commit to it regardless, not rushing to say ‘I told you so’ or derail progress later.
Shared accountability
A cohesive team takes collective responsibility for all successes and failures. Team members hold each other accountable without placing unnecessary blame. They proactively inform colleagues if they’re facing challenges and seek help. Those who’ve made mistakes own up and commit to making amends.
Creating a workplace that has this level of team cohesion requires conscious thought and sustained effort. Here are ten strategies you can use to set a strong foundation.
Summarize this article for me please10 Strategies to Improve Team Cohesion
Building team cohesion is not a one-off activity. It is an ongoing exercise that every team leader and manager has to perform. It is a behavioral practice that everyone has to undertake.
However, you can put these behaviors into practice with any of the best project management tools. Here are some strategies and how you can use the right tools to implement them.
1. Define your mission
A team that understands the mission will rally together to reach its goals. To improve team cohesion, clarify your vision for the future through an actionable and purposeful mission.
- Put it in the context of market needs and competition
- Make it relevant to the emotional needs and collective motivations of the team
- Keep it long-term, so you don’t have to change it often
- Make it purposeful
“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” was Google’s mission for their search product. It is contextual, relevant, long-term, and purposeful. It is a mission that employees can rally towards, not just within their work hours but in their lives, too.
Once you’ve set the mission, publish it publicly. Put it up on the digital whiteboard or the company wiki, so everyone can see it easily and often.
2. Set SMART team goals
If the mission defines the ‘what’ of your team, your goals show ‘how.’ Derive goals from your mission. Set objectives for the team as well as individual team members. Make them SMART goals, i.e., specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
To ensure that the team is focused on its goals at all time, you need to make it accessible and track progress along the way. A good project management tool will enable this for individual as well as team goals.
ClickUp Goals are designed to make them visible and accessible to the team at all times. To improve team cohesion, use ClickUp Goals to have detailed conversations with every team member to ensure they understand their goals.
Eliminate ambiguity. Discuss dependencies and relationships so everyone is clear about what they’re accountable for.
3. Strengthen project management
A cohesive team needs a collaborative space. The office typically plays this role, but it’s not enough. More so for hybrid teams. To improve team cohesion, create robust communication systems.
Project organization: Set up a comprehensive project management tool like ClickUp for all team communication. Break down the project into tasks, sub-tasks, and checklists, so team members understand how their everyday activities contribute to business goals. Clearly communicate expectations and measures of success for each task.
Customize: Use ClickUp to create workflows customized for your needs. Add custom fields, tags, and assignees. Save your filters. Automate repeatable tasks/events like standup meetings. Set smart notifications. Interpret code right within ClickUp.
Manage your projects in a way that’s right for you with ClickUp’s custom project management.
Team communication: Enable team members to ask questions and have healthy debates through the nested comments and ClickUp Chat View.
Real-time collaboration: What’s more? Keep everyone on the same page with ClickUp’s collaboration detection. Let your team members know when others are typing so they can edit docs together in real time.
If you’re new to this, try ClickUp’s project management templates to give you a kickstart. Customize as you need and make them your own!
4. Share knowledge
For a team to function cohesively, every team member must have all the knowledge and context at all times. However, in the hustle of a fast-moving project, it’s easy for information to fall through the cracks.
Use a project collaboration tool like ClickUp to share knowledge, create wikis, and connect them to workflows.
ClickUp Docs’ nested pages, styling options, embedded bookmarks, and more allow you to create and share knowledge team-wide. They can also edit these documents, tag users, add comments, and collaborate effectively in real-time, keeping organizational knowledge always updated.
5. Brainstorm together
For ‘disagree but commit’ to work, team members must be part of the decision-making process from the beginning. They need to see the problem, possible solutions, and the thought process behind the final choice made.
The best way to do this is to bring the team to brainstorm together. ClickUp Whiteboard allows you to draw, add shapes, write text, insert stickie notes, tag users, and more, all in one place.
Whether you’re brainstorming ideas, building business strategy, mapping process workflows, or organizing tasks, use the whiteboard to create transparency. Invite comments and build consensus.
6. Build trust
To be transparent, team members need to trust each other. They must believe their challenges and shortcomings will not be used against them. Create a culture of trust—lead by example.
Conduct open and honest retrospectives. Admit to your mistakes. Write down notes from these retrospectives to show that mistakes are okay as long as we learn from them.
Encourage team members to honestly admit their mistakes, too. When they do, appreciate them and help them make amends.
7. Celebrate successes
Positive reinforcement comes from celebrating a job well done. Whenever you complete a sprint or solve a problem, celebrate success as a team. Bring the entire team together.
Schedule team-building activities to help them to understand each other better. During these activities:
- Thank your team members for their contributions
- Identify and acknowledge exceptional effort
- Appreciate behavior that helps team cohesion
- Facilitate conversations between team members who are in conflict
- Connect this success back to team goals and mission
ClickUp Dashboards can help with this offering high-level overviews and deep insights with fully customizable reports.
8. Decentralize decision-making
One of the biggest challenges of team cohesion is the centralization of authority. Managers often become the glue that holds the team together, making all decisions themselves.
This can harm engagement and autonomy, which is necessary for team cohesion. It can also hinder process efficiencies.
To avoid this, actively decentralize decision-making. Delegate problems and encourage team members to find solutions. Ask them for their opinion on decisions (as much as reasonable).
Train and coach team members to be self-managed. Set aside discretionary budgets for teams to spend on necessary tools.
9. Encourage productive conflict
In knowledge work, diverse points of view matter enormously. Whether it’s building software or architecture, all work is strengthened by the input and feedback of diverse team members.
While discussing diverse ideas, disagreements are bound to arise. It is the manager’s responsibility to encourage healthy discussions between the disagreeing team members so that the conflicts can be resolved.
Actively listen to what each person is saying. Ask probing questions about their rationale. Direct the conversation towards a solution instead of dwelling on who is right or wrong.
This doesn’t mean the manager must play mediator in every conflict. Alternatively, the manager must create a culture where team members can openly talk to each other and resolve conflicts themselves. Team building exercises designed for conflict management are a great way to enable this.
10. Hire for team cohesion
Before everything else, keep team cohesion in mind while hiring. That is not to say that you should employ similar people with similar opinions. On the contrary, it has been well-established that diverse teams are better for business.
However, team dynamics change every time a new person joins the team. To create a cohesive group, managers must ensure that the new team member is not particularly disruptive. Look for candidates with:
- Communication and collaboration skills
- Ability to take feedback and resolve conflict
- Work collectively with others and share credit for outcomes
- Set aside politics in the interest of the team
More importantly, hire and pay equitably. Inequality and perceived unfairness will affect team cohesion.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBuild Cohesive Teams with ClickUp’s Collaboration Tools
For a team to be cohesive, it needs thoughtful communication, a culture of openness, and a collaborative workspace. ClickUp teams enables all this and more.
ClickUp’s project management software is designed to be the one app for all business needs, irrespective of the type of work. Tasks and sub-tasks bring order to the project, creating clarity.
Comments facilitate open conversations. Whiteboard and Mind Maps help with collaborative problem-solving and brainstorming.
ClickUp Docs centralizes project-related information and makes it accessible to everyone on the team. Goals and dashboards give everyone the necessary visibility to drive the project forward.Build a cohesive team with ClickUp. Sign up for free today.
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