The 5 Teamwork Mistakes You’re Making (and How to Fix Them)
After 5 years of research and almost a decade of working across multiple sectors, including with C-Suite, I have seen the same teamwork mistakes time and time again. Sometimes it's hard to spot these mistakes in the moment, and it's only with reflection that they become clear. By taking proactive steps to use the interactional tools available to us, we can avoid these mistakes from happening in the first place.
Mistake 1: Individuals act before understanding
Problem: Teams often jump into tasks, eager to make progress. But doing so without shared understandings, without collectively making sense of what needs to be achieved, and without knowing how it can be achieved, can lead to wasted time as misunderstandings happen and repair is needed. This can fundamentally undermine decision making.
Solution: To make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction, focus on two simple interactional tools at the start of any interaction, which will provide the foundations for everything that follows:
Sensemaking - Share your own understandings of the task and combine these with everyone else's to create a set of shared understanding you can base everything on going forward.
Shared Interactional Goals - Break down your team goal into much smaller interactional goals. These goals are detail and action focused.
Mistake 2: Teams focus on top down hierarchies
Problem: Managers will often create teams from the top down, but this can impose a structure that individuals feel obliged to follow. This can create artificial restrictions on how the team works, limiting the inputs and outputs of a team.
Solution: Instead of focusing on hierarchies, focus on how everyone can contribute. To help with this, try using two interactional tools:
Alignment - If an interactional goal will help a team to achieve their broader team or organisational goals, whenever you can, agree with the interactional goals of others and act to support their achievement.
Progressivity - No matter your role or job title, think about what you can say and do that will help others to achieve their goals. Achieving the agreed goal in-the-moment should be valued above doing anything else.
It is only when you are aligning with and progressing towards shared interactional goals that you can be considered a member of the interactional team.
Mistake 3: Individuals (knowingly or unknowingly) self-censor
Problem: Whether we know it or not, most of us self-censor at work. That means we have potentially valuable information we could share but choose not to, resulting in a narrow range of perspectives feeding into decision making. This can result in poor decisions being made, with it only becoming clear that a bad decision was made once it is too late.
Solution: To overcome self-censoring we need two interactional tools:
Psychological Safety - To feel comfortable to contribute, there must be an understanding that contributions won’t be ridiculed or unduly criticised. But we can go further, and actively encourage people to contribute and reward honesty and constructiveness.
Speaking Up - We all have understandings, knowledge, and expertise to share. We need to identify what is useful to share and when, and how we can combine our understandings, knowledge, and expertise with others to create new understandings and knowledge.
Mistake 4: Improvement is hindered by risk management
Problem: Some organisations and teams are naturally risk-adverse, which can become harmful when opportunities are missed. This can hold a team back, preventing them from getting better at what they do, how they do it, and the results they deliver.
Solution: There’s always room for improvement, but it often requires two interactional tools, both core actions of teaming:
Experimentation - Experimentation can be both an individual action and a collective sequence of actions, being either spontaneous or pre-planned. Generally, experiments should be frequent and varied, iterating to find new and better solutions.
Reflection - There are always opportunities for learning, but robust reflection is often needed to find the most impactful learnings. This can be both an informal, individual action and a coordinated, collective sequence of actions.
Mistake 5: Failures are ignored
Problem: Failure is very common. Small failures are often barely noticeable, and when they are compensated against they can become invisible. But when they are covered up, these small failures can add up to larger, more noticeable and impactful failures.
Solution: The best way of avoiding the larger, more impactful failures is to tackle and learn from the smaller failures that happen every day. This can be done through an iterative process, using four interactional tools which are core actions of teaming, including Speaking Up, Collaboration, Experimentation, and Reflection. But different types of failures need to be tackled in different ways:
Preventable Failures - This type of failure is caused by lack of knowledge, skills, or support, or through a change in behaviour that leads to deviations in established processes. Training and support should be provided, with trials of improved techniques being piloted in an iterative approach to process improvement.
Complex Failures - This type of failure is caused by a lack of certainty that goes ignored or unnoticed until it is too late and systems or processes break down. These types of failures may be preventable with proactive identification of vulnerabilities. Solutions should be tested off-line before rolling out, providing opportunities to identify new points of failure.
Intelligent Failures - This failure comes from an unsuccessful outcome of a deliberate experimentation, and is intelligent because it provides valuable data that grant opportunities for learning. With Speaking Up, Collaboration, further Experimentation, and Reflection, this learning can be digested and put into practice.
BONUS Mistakes: You’re not teaming smart
Problem: Most people are never taught how to work well together, they don’t know what good teamwork actually looks like, they struggle to come up with new ideas or solutions, departments operate in silos, individuals become disengaged, and learning is not taken forward or shared.
Solution: All of these can be solved by teaming. Dr Marc Owens of TeamingSmart has created The Teaming Toolkit to help you put the core principle of teaming into practice. The Teaming Toolkit is split into 4 compartments:
Understand - Uncover the foundations of interactions and how we use turns at talk to achieve things together.
Construct - Talk an interactional team into existence, dynamically changing its membership as the needs of the team changes.
Act - Do productive teamwork together, combining everyone’s valuable understandings, knowledge, and expertise to get the best results.
Capture - Realise value for your teams and end customers through teaming smart and achieving more together.
To find out more about teaming and how TeamingSmart can help your remote, hybrid, and technology-enabled teams to overcome teamwork challenges, improve decision making, and turn failures into sustainable successes through a practical teaming approach that focuses on improving what your teams are already doing rather than adding more meetings or processes, contact us today: