If you’ve ever wondered how to put together a dynamic team that not only respects each other but achieves positive results, you might want to ask Howard Mittman. Mittman has managed to do what many cannot – bringing a diverse group of collaborators together and actually achieving success. The winning concept is team collaboration and it works. Here are four major benefits this approach can offer to any team effort.
Open Communication
When people can speak constructively without fear of judgment or backlash, it creates an environment that fosters open communication. Open communication is a proven method for solid team cohesion and effective commercial success.
Teams that consciously practice open communication:
- Increase in positive attitudes towards team members
- Open mindfulness toward the subject matter
- Encourages behavioral control during potentially tense moments
- Expands sharing of information between team members
When individuals work together, open communication allows everyone to give their best toward a common goal. Without the fear of rejection or minimization, freely spoken ideas help lead to amazing outcomes.
Team Trust
If anyone remembers going to camp or retreats, there may have been team-building exercises that focused on trust. It’s a time-tested and true notion that having trust between team members is an invaluable tool for creating productive groups.
Teams that have a solid trust base often:
- Have team members that are actively engaged in projects
- Have increased productivity from all team members
- Have much lower turnover rates than teams with low trust levels
A team collaborative approach facilitates trust for teams because every person feels valuable. Typically, being able to trust is tantamount to feeling safe. When team members trust their group, each person feels safe enough to contribute and perform. Essentially, a trusted team has the best chance of being a happy team.
Better Role Clarity
Sometimes, when a group begins a new project, each team member’s role takes a while to emerge. As the project continues to evolve, individual responsibilities may change, be added, or even be eliminated. Applying a collaborative team approach can clarify roles much sooner.
Strong role clarity in teams helps:
- Decrease frustration for team members
- Increase collaborative efforts amongst team members
- Build confidence for individual and collective skill sets for team members
Of course, team leaders will have to take each member’s strengths into account when assembling a successful group. In doing so, roles can be assigned to yield the best results for the team’s objective. However, a team collaborative approach incorporates much more than identifying strengths just to produce optimal outcomes. It focuses more on the individual team members creating supergroups – and encourages that positive, productive energy to continue in the future.
Diverse Application and Real Results
As mentioned before, Howard Mittman consciously chooses to diversify workgroups. The reason is that diversity reflects the real world. So, when teams are composed of diverse groups of people, the actual results will yield outcomes that are realistically applicable.
Diverse work groups offer:
- More careful consideration of real-life outcomes
- Fact-based applications
- Innovative ideas
Diversity encourages progress. When it is factored into workgroups, that progressive energy can produce outstanding results.