Collaboration is the cornerstone of every team. Without it, you only have a bunch of individuals disparately and discretely working on separate tasks – without the ability to make meaningful contributions towards achieving the team’s goals.
Now, how do you get a team to start acting like one? Specifically, how can you foster collaboration even in the most dysfunctional organisation? A 90-minute team building exercise may finally get your team to start collaborating.
Please tell us more!
Before we explain, let’s understand what makes teams collaborate in the first place. This boils down to matching up the right people to work on certain tasks. A process, which is done right generates a level of synchronisation that lets both team members work together toward achieving their goals in the most efficient way possible.
This hour-and-a-half team building exercise is based on that premise. Called Network of Teams, this activity from the good folks at Atlassian lets you identify the right people for a project in a way that guarantees collaboration.
You can find the exercise in full detail here, but, top-line, the activity involves preparing a document with the team’s strategic goal and creating categories for different team types and areas of influence. From here, you invite team members to contribute to the network map to determine the interaction strength between critical teams, focusing on improving the network’s strengths and weaknesses.
The exercise also has several variations. Each focuses on evaluating different areas of collaboration, namely visibility, coordination, alignment and learning and feedback.
How Network of Teams can improve team collaboration
The 90-minute exercise can do more than simply help you figure out the people appropriate for a project and who they should team up with. It can get your team members to collaborate through the following:
- Clarity of common goals. Through team mapping, team members get to understand common strategic goals and how their individual efforts contribute to the larger objective. This creates a clarity that fosters a sense of purpose and nurtures a cohesive work environment.
- Identifying dependencies and risks. The exercise lets teams identify what’s critical to the project and the risks involved in the undertaking. This encourages them to work together to develop contingencies and draw up plans to mitigate risks.
- Promoting communication and engagement. The activity encourages open and inclusive communication and active engagement. This allows plenty of freedom to provide feedback, enabling learning and identification of areas that need improvement.
- Establishing ownership of relationships. Propping up relationship owners creates crucial points of communication between teams, leading to stronger and more effective collaboration.
- Evaluating interaction strength. By understanding the current level of interaction among your teams, you get to identify the aspects that need improvement. Teams can address these gaps by improving their communication structure and through regular updates.
- Increasing transparency and alignment. Through open discussions and insight-sharing, the exercise improves interactions within the organisation. This easily improves transparency and reduces conflicts, allowing teams to better align their goals and priorities with each other.