Building Effective Teams – Part 1 Relationships

Developing Strong Relationships

Improving productivity by building strong teams is a management approach as old as the pyramids – quite literally. Archaeologists studying the Great Pyramid at Giza have found inscriptions of worker’s team names such as the “Drunkards of Menkaure” and the “Friends of Khufu”. There is evidence of competitions between the different groups to see how fast they could put the massive stones in place. The ancient Egyptians must have recognised the importance of creating strong team identities to help them manage and boost productivity. This principle really hasn’t changed much in the intervening 4,000 years!

How do you create strong teams? One useful approach is to split up team building activities into three levels:

• Level One – Creating strong relationships. This is the foundation activity for all teams, without this the other levels are difficult to achieve
• Level Two – Creating excellent communication. Facilitating timely transfer of information between the group
• Level Three – Delivering tasks efficiently and cohesively. To do this well you need the other two levels to be in place.

In this article I will focus on the foundation level, developing relationships within the team. In the next article I’ll look at the communication level and in part 3 the task levels.

In my experience great work relationships do not necessarily lead to great social relationships. I would say that although it is hard to work with someone who you really don’t like, you definitely don’t have to be their best buddy. Good working relationships are built on respect and trust for each other. Just like any friendship this takes time and continuing effort to achieve.

One of the challenges of working in a modern office is that we all tend to sit and stare at a computer screen for much of the day. We can quite easily sit next to people that we hardly talk to. To build relationships amongst the team we need to get them to take time away from their computers and interact face-to-face. It’s hard to build relationships through emails. How do you do this? Well of course there’s a variety of methods from simple things like regular team meetings or going out to lunch together, to the, sometimes dreaded, “team building away day!”

Regular meetings work at all three levels of the model, helping us to get to know each other, improving communication and co-ordinating tasks. Too many long meetings can be detrimental, keep them short and focused. Maybe you could borrow some ideas from Agile development approaches like SCRUM and have stand-up meetings to keep them quick.

Management approaches they get the group working face-to-face rather than on a PC are great at building relationships. I always find the post-it pad a great tool for this. For example rather than writing a plan using MS Project and emailing it around for comment, I quite often run planning workshops where everyone writes tasks on a post-it and we all start creating the plan on the meeting room wall. Little things like this change the dynamic of the group, build relationships and facilitate easy communication.

Going on team building events I think can be successful. However if the managers pay no heed to the principles of trusting and respecting their teams in normal work hours, throwing people on an away day won’t solve the team dynamics. I remember working with a very difficult managing director of a small web development company. She treated her staff with little respect, changing their work around all the time, ringing them up at weekends and making derogatory comments about them behind their backs. She wondered why her team was so badly de-motivated. To fix the problem she sent them on a corporate day where everyone learnt to play a set of drums together – a rather cheesy and Office-esque metaphor of getting people to work together by learning to play together! Of course it didn’t really help the situation when everyone got back to the office.

It’s important to put time aside each week to get to know your team. I remember one fabulous operations manager I worked for who, each week, would take one of us out for lunch. It was a great way for him to get to know his team and for us to understand him better. Because it’s difficult to see the direct tangible benefits from these sorts of activities, they are so easy to stop doing. However good team building requires long-term commitment.

In the early days of Hewlett Packard, Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett devised a way of managing their staff which they simply called “management by walking around” They spent some time each week getting away from their computer screen and walking around the office to chat to their team.  I’ve found this very effective. It’s given me a chance to get to know my team members in a way that is not possible in meetings and via email.

Any other ideas for relationship building – please comment below.

Tagged as: Business coaching, Executive Coaching, Leadership, Management development, Project Management, Team Building

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