How many of the five points below apply to you?
They are all positive; the more apply to you, the better.
Below, you will find an explanation of each.
Five signs you are good at fostering teamwork
Your meetings are useful and relevant.
When your team members talk during meetings, they go to the point before people lose attention.
Your team members know how to write clear emails, effective progress updates, etc.
Your people know how to give feedback to each other (and do so regularly).
You train and coach your people on how to communicate internally: how to give feedback, how to ask for help, etc.
The five signs, explained
1. Your meetings are useful and relevant
This point might seem about communication, but really it’s about teamwork. People won’t collaborate if it feels like a waste of time.
2. When your team members talk during meetings, they go to the point before people lose attention
This is an extension of the previous point. People losing everyone’s attention during a meeting is a massive red flag for a lack of communication skills across your team (which makes teamwork harder).
If you notice that attention runs low during team meetings, it’s probably the time to train and coach your people on effective communication. Don’t enroll them in a public speaking class, though! That wouldn’t teach the relevant skillset. Instead, you should teach them to communicate more clearly and to say things that are relevant to others (and the intermediate step to teach the latter is explaining what each team member cares about from a work-related point of view – something necessary for effective teamwork). This skillset would improve internal communication, thus fostering teamwork.
3. When your people ask each other for help, they have a good experience
If your people have bad experiences when asking for information from each other, assigning tasks to each other, or generally working together, teamwork and engagement will decrease.
If your people aren’t keen on working with each other, asking them to work with each other won’t have any effect. Instead, what will be effective is to ensure that if and when they work with each other, they have a good experience – which doesn’t mean having fun but feeling like the other person is helpful.
This might require some training and coaching from your side, both on improving the way people ask for feedback and help, and how they provide it.
Note: any training and coaching you do must be extremely specific and tailored to the exact work your people do. Just teaching “teamwork” won’t be effective. Instead, teach, e.g., “how to ask for help with a proposal” and “how to give feedback on a proposal.”
4. Your people know how to give feedback to each other (and do so regularly)
This is an extension of the previous point. Working together well requires giving each other’s feedback.
How often and how well people give feedback to each other largely depends on their skills at giving feedback and on their previous experiences doing so.
What happened the last time they gave feedback? Was it well received?
And what happened the last time they asked for feedback? Did they receive anything useful?
Hence, to have good teamwork, you must both teach people how to ask for feedback well and how to give feedback well.
5. You train and coach your people on how to communicate internally: how to give feedback, how to ask for help, etc.
This point sums up all previous ones. Whether people work with each other well depends not much on whether they are friends but on what happens when they interact with each other. If they collaborate, do they feel like the other person is capable and responsible? If they ask for feedback, do they get helpful one? And if they give feedback, do they feel listened to?
While, to some extent, the characters and talents of the people on your team matter, whatever the current situation, you can and should improve it through some training and, more importantly, coaching. (Here is a short guide on coaching for better internal communications.)
That was it. How many of the five points apply to you?
This article is the fifth of a six-part series of self-assessments on people-management habits. Here are parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. Subscribe to this newsletter to receive the rest over the following days.
I also talk about how to foster teamwork in my Managing Remote Teams course.