Create The Right Environment
“What matters most to collaboration is not the personalities, attitudes, or behavioral styles of team members,” write Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen in the aforementioned article in yesterday’s blog post. “Instead what teams need to thrive are certain ‘enabling conditions’.” According to Haas and Mortensen, the secret to great teamwork and collaboration involves four components: a compelling direction, a strong structure, a supportive context, and a shared mindset. The two enabling conditions I want to focus on here are the strong structure and the supportive context.
As they explain, “High-performing teams include members with a balance of skills. Every individual doesn’t have to possess superlative technical and social skills, but the team overall needs a healthy dose of both.” Then, they write that that “Larger teams are more vulnerable to poor communication, fragmentation, and free riding (due to a lack of accountability).” From my experience, I have seen both of these elements taking place. When the structure includes “a balance of skills,” and the reduction of the more vulnerable elements listed above, the potential for great teamwork and collaboration will take place.
However, Haas and Mortensen note one other element that makes a difference when it comes to a strong structure. As they explain, “Teams can reduce the potential for dysfunction by establishing clear norms - rules that spell out a small number of things members must always do (such as arrive at meetings on time and give everyone a a turn to speak.) and a small number they must never do (such as interrupt)….. And in teams whose membership is fluid, explicitly reiterating norms at regular intervals is key.”
Years ago, I worked with a team who had the courage to explore their core values at a behavioral level rather than just at a conceptual level. Step by step, they walked through each of their core values and asked themselves two important questions: What do they look like in action? What behaviors would make that a reality? Ever since then, I have admired the courage it took for them to hold this conversation and to boil it down to some very specific behavioral norms within the organization.
I also admired the leader who ran this organization. I believe she had no idea what was going to surface during such in-depth dialogue. Yet, she had the faith and clarity to proceed in spite of her possible fears or worries. The outcome from this work has made a major difference. While her industry has gone through chaotic and transformational change, and her immediate team membership has been fluid, the organization has done exceptionally well. From my vantage point, this has happened because they have established clear behavioral norms and stuck to them through it all.
Along with a strong structure, the second element that Haas and Mortensen focus on is a supportive context. As they write, “Having the right support is the third condition that enables team effectiveness.” Here, they focus on the team having the right resources, information and training in order to be successful. They also note, “Ensuring a supportive context is often difficult for teams that are geographically distributed and digitally dependent, because the resources available to members may vary a lot.” I have witnessed this often and I have also witnessed a variety of different organizations address this challenge in three unique ways.
First, they build shared knowledge. As Haas and Mortensen write, “Incomplete information is likewise more prevalent in 4-D teams…. Information won’t provide much value if it isn’t communicated to the rest of the team. After all, shared knowledge is the cornerstone of effective collaboration; it gives a group a frame of reference, allows the group to interpret situations and decisions correctly, helps people understand one another better, and greater increase efficiency.” This level of shared knowledge comes from shared learning experiences and shared team experiences. The overall goal is to increase common language, perspective, and understanding across the entire organization, not just within one team.
Creating and utilizing common language is critical factor in becoming a team, and improving teamwork and collaboration. “Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness,” writes Brene’ Brown in her book, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (Random House, 2021). “Having access to the right words can open up entire universes…. Language shows us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.”
Furthermore, when teams members build connections on multiple levels through shared learning and shared experiences, the outcome is powerful, namely a sense of belonging. As Brown explains, “True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.” And in the end, that is the challenge for all of us who are wanting to improve teamwork and collaboration. We do not need to change who we are to fit in. Instead, we need to be who we are so we can connect and belong.
Second, they ensure all subgroups feel valued for their contribution toward the overall goal. Returning to the work of Haas and Mortensen, they write, “… there are many ways team leaders can actively foster a shared identity and shared understanding and break down barriers to cooperation and information exchange. One powerful approach is to ensure that each subgroup feels valued for its contribution toward the team’s overall goals.”
I think the challenge here is that many people, subgroups, teams, and departments do not feel like what they are doing is making much of a difference on any level. It is just more effort, more paperwork, and more hassles on a day to day basis. The problem is that they have lost line of sight from their work to the team’s overall goal or goals.
From my vantage point, the concept of line of sight is vital to success. At work, everyone has things that need to get done. Some are on a daily level and others are on a weekly level. Many of these things are SOP, i.e. standard operating procedures. At the same time, they are working on certain priorities and projects related to the team’s overall goal or goals. When there is line of sight, an individual or team can connect the dots from their actions to the team’s goals, and then from the team’s goals to the organization’s current strategic plan. When this happens, then all involved know two things. First, my job matters to the overall success of the team and the organization. Second, we are making progress and my contribution is helping us to make progress. This level of clarity builds commitment, shared identity and shared understanding. It also helps all involved feel valued as they contribute to the work of the team.
Third, when wanting to create the right environment for teamwork and collaboration, leaders create structured unstructured time. Again, Hass and Mortensen note that effective leaders “… promote shared understanding through a practice called “structured unstructured time” - that is, time blocked off in the schedule to talk about matters not directly related to the task at hand.” As they continue, “How will you know if your efforts are working? … [evaluate] team effectiveness on three criteria: output, collaborative ability, and members’ individual development.”
There are multiple questions that can be explored during structured unstructured time. The former is one such example. When I was actively consulting and was hired to help a team improve their teamwork and their ability to collaborate, I often utilized the six questions found in the following book: Lencioni, Patrick. The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business (Jossey-Bass, 2012). As Lencioni wrote, “Why do we exist?”, “How do we behave?”, “What do we do?”, “How will we succeed?”, “What is most important, right now?”, and “Who must do what?”. Each of these questions has the potential to build a shared understanding and common focus within the team and between teams. The challenge is to make time and space for this level of dialogue and to support people as they explore and process the answers that surface. Creating the right environment for teamwork and collaboration is hard work and worth every minute invested in the process.
People Are The Solution
“People are the solution to the problems that confront us,” writes Margaret Wheatley in her book, Turning To One Another: simple conversations to restore hope to the future, (Berret-Koehler, 2001). “Technology is not the solution, although it can help. We are the solution - we as generous, open-hearted people who want to use our creativity and caring on behalf of other human beings and all life.” I agree 100% with her assertion that people are the solution, and I have witnessed this numerous times over multiple decades.
And yet, if we seek to improve teamwork and collaboration in the midst of challenging times, we need to remember two things about people. First, as Wheatley notes, “Thinking is the place where intelligent action begins.” The work of helping people begins when we create uninterrupted space and time for reflection, because this is the effective prerequisite for using “our creativity and caring on behalf of other human beings and all life.” When we commit to this level of preparatory work, we must remember that this level of thinking is messy. Solutions and answers to big questions or big problems do not arrive all neatly packaged, organized and with a bow. Instead ,they come as pieces which we must put together. In short, the solutions to teamwork and collaboration issues are emergent rather than fully organized. Therefore, we must come prepared for the emergent process as we seek “the solution to the problems that confront us.”
Second, Wheatley writes: “People don’t support things that are forced on them. We don’t act responsibly on behalf of plans and programs created without us. We resist being changed, not change itself.” I think in our rush to solve problems we often forget to engage with people in order that they can co-create the solutions with us. Instead, in our rush to fix problems instead of co-generate solutions, we forget that ownership of the problem and the solution is important as implementing the solution. However, when we do seek to create clarity and ownership, we build an environment where generous and open-hearted people can come together as a team or work together as teams in order to create change based on choice rather than force.
When leaders seek to increase effective teamwork and collaboration, they are making a long term commitment to people and to process. It takes time and energy to develop a shared mindset and to create the right environment to support all involved to move forward together. Yet, when those involved understand what is normal, recognize that effective collaboration is a continuum and the sum of multiple behaviors, then all involved will rise to the challenges before them, whether this is summiting a Mount Everest level problem or going the distance over a mountain range of multiple problems. Because in the end, as Christopher Novak noted earlier, it is all “about the people we take with us on our journey forward.” And improving teamwork and collaboration is a worthwhile journey each and every day.
© Geery Howe 2025
