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3.5 | What have you learned from / observed around your team effectiveness?
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We did a wisdom circle for an issue that a teammate was having. Providing a safe space for someone to be vulnerable and express a personal issue was paramount. But it also gave a safe place for the ones giving feedback too. There was a sense of safety and closeness within the group, and that make the meeting more meaningful, and effective.
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It’s easy not to prioritize connection, but it is the most important thing, we are a team and need to depend on each other to do our work and when we pause to connect it makes that interdependence easier and more joyful.
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I think the big thing for me here is explicitly working on psychological safety as an effectiveness driver. I thought I very much do this and seek open feedback and really appreciate it. However recently I have had some feedback that this is not always felt and my intentions may not be coming through as strongly as I would like now I have moved into more senior roles. I am trying to be even more explicit in using the strategies we talked about, particularly sharing my own vulnerabilities and mistakes and really openly appreciating others for doing the same.
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The more I practice with grounding myself and staying present, the better things always go, especially in the difficult moments.
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Our teams seem to be more effective when in smaller groups on some level, but that also contributes to one of our larger problems around people not feeling cohesive enough overall. I feel like we need to determine a good compromise between large identity-losing projects that give the group a shared objective and smaller groups that allow people to really tackle community issues they personally feel directly tied to or passionate about without having to run every single piece of information through a long, lengthy voting & feedback process.
I think part of our discordance comes from the fact that many people feel like they are doing tons of work but have little to show for it beyond more meetings and more interpersonal misunderstandings. Building in some sort of rewards or community support meetings where people feel re-invested in the group and our projects would likely go a long way toward retention and building more effectiveness overall.
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I’m part of a complex organization with the singular goal of supporting students through higher education. Aside from my classroom, I lead the faculty group for my department (about 45 people). Since these are teaching faculty, we measure their effectiveness by the student experience and learning. Through this program, I’ve realized that effectiveness looks different for each teacher. Measuring their interactions with students with a common rubric is problematic because our work is so relational. I’ve begun asking faculty in observations how they measure their teaching.
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I find that often we are struggling with the same issues separately and there are opportunities to take the time to create process changes to solve issues for al.
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I have been consciously trying to build psychological safety among my team for the last 2.5 years – although I did not yet have that label for what I was doing. I had thought more along the lines of team building. My (bold) strategy is pretty basic. Meet regularly, never cancel, always start with a check-in, model vulnerability, foster inclusive discussions (although I need to do more to intentionally draw out people who have stayed quiet). All this to say – I can see some change, some movement in a positive direction, some ability to be candid, to disagree and come out the other side. And we are more effective because of this, although there is much more to do.
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I started noticing when others where quiet or different in meetings and created settings outside the meetings to reach out, to adapt to their styles and to provide praise and build their confidence. This have led to more action oriented and productive team.
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I’ve been focusing on identifying teammates’ areas of specific strength and delegating tasks that are catered to or can help to keep growing these strengths. Deferring more and more to the team members in questions or decision-making around these areas has been helping us to develop a more collaborative team dynamic in which I think staff feel honored for their expertise.
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I recently joined a new team and observed that there’s no communication across departments. As the marketing team leader, I’ve spent my early days trying to find ways to pull the teams together. Wish me luck!
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Our team in our departnment is made up of several different areas which means it’s easy to get siloed. In order for us to truly be effective, we need to have a lot of collaboration and planning together. We’ve recently added a position and have someone in place facilitating this and it’s brought about a huge shift in ur effectiveness (ex: we have an 18 month calendar so we know what to expect from everyone, when and can collaborate in advance instead of on short notice- yay!)
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As we have begun changing the structure of our meetings, I’ve noticed quite a change in team effectiveness. Primarily via how we both show up in meetings and hold ourselves accountable: Now that we have established a clear task management system, teammates feel a lot more confident that the topics that have been discussed are on someone’s to-do list and the added visibility keeps people even more accountable to the timelines they themselves set. It’s also created a greater sense of ownership and agency across the board, which just further reinforces the preciousness and respect we have for each other during the times we do have together as a team.
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