How to improve teamwork and communication

No matter how great your team is, we can always keep working on how we can improve team collaboration and communication. Now that many teams are experiencing remote working or hybrid working, feeling part of a team has never been more important, or more difficult to do.

Teamwork and communication is bit of a chicken and egg situation. Do you get great teamwork because you are so good at communicating, or was great communication a side-effect of great teamwork?

I would argue that communication builds teamwork. Sure, it helps that you are lucky enough to have a group of like-minded people who seem to like each other, are all motivated to do great work and emotionally smart enough to understand the nuances of human behaviour and team dynamics… but for me it comes back to communication. Every. Single. Time.

Here are my thoughts.

1. All behaviour is communication.

I heard this once and I believe it is entirely true. The trouble is, we pick and choose which bits we want to interpret and go with and which we’d rather ignore. Whether someone’s behaviour is “good” or “bad”, listen to it. Look at it. Be curious about it. Better yet, ask them about it.

2. Communication takes a lot of work.

If you are leading a team, you may feel like all communication falls on your responsible shoulders. Well, I’m here to tell you it doesn’t. Communication takes work from everyone. Yes, as a leader you have a responsibility to ensure that communication is taking place, but it can’t be one sided. Communication is a conversation, and last time I checked, you need more than one person to do that.

If you have people working remotely or from home a few days per week, you need to OVER-communicate. I’m not talking about micro-managing, but just because Sanjay is happy working from home and stuff is getting done, the temptation can be to just let him “get on with it”. Stop that right now. You need to make sure that Sanjay knows what’s going on in the team and vice versa. You need to know how Sanjay is doing, as if he were sitting right next to you. No excuses.

3. Communication needs to be consistent.

Don’t be a flash in the pan. If you are setting up regular communications, stick with it. Make it a habit. This is how we just DO things around here… If you jump onto the next shiny thing that comes along and your weekly bulletin goes by the wayside, or you start bumping your one to one meetings or your monthly team meetings become quarterly, or your Monday morning phone around doesn’t happen until Thursday, then you may as well give up now. Consistency builds trust, it helps develop cultures, is means that people know what to expect.

4. Replace “but” with “and”.

Bear with me on this one… how many times do you use the word “but”? Probably more times than you think, but I challenge you to switch out “but” and replace it with “and”. So why is that important? Using the word “but” implies that there are two realties and that one is more important than the other. Let me give you an example. “I know you’re snowed under with work but I need that report first thing in the morning”.

Reality 1 – person A is snowed under.

Reality 2 – person B needs the report in the morning.

Using BUT in this example overrules person A’s busyness and puts the importance on B’s own reality, the fact they want the report in the morning.

Let’s try again.

“I know you’re snowed under with work and I need that report first thing in the morning”.

Straightaway both realities are on an equal level and what happens next is a conversation about how this situation gets remedied. And do you think that person A may be more receptive to being helpful now that they aren’t being railroaded by person B? Answers on a postcard please.

Get everyone doing this and you can change everything.

5. Be compassionate in your communication.

Compassionate communication is an incredibly huge topic in itself, but ultimately it is about communication in a way that is clear, authentic and comes from a place of non-judgement. Key to this is not mistaking opinions for facts, or rather understanding the difference between evaluation and observation. If you evaluate (judge) then any comeback from your communication partner is going to come in the form of defensiveness. Any energy to be had in an engaging and productive conversation will be lost as we start to fight our own corners because we feel judged. You do this a lot. We all do. Be mindful of it and seek to make changes.

Getting teamwork and communication improved cannot happen in isolation. If you want to get your team onboard, talk about how they want to work together, get input from everyone and make an agreement in how you intend to work with each other. Celebrate your team and its togetherness and get communication working for you rather than against you. You can see how even a slight change in language can change the whole dynamic of how a conversation can go.

Try it out, share it with others and see how it goes!