Struggling to Collaborate With Your Team?

Do you ever feel like you’re struggling to collaborate with your team?

This is a common concern we hear from managers from diverse industries at varying levels within their company.

So, how do you shift from an employee-manager relationship where you’re telling your direct reports what to do to an adult-to-adult relationship, where you’re partnering with your team to reach a common goal?

Lencioni’s pyramid depicting the Five Dysfunctions of a Team shows the foundation of a high-performing team is trust.

In a trusting team culture, team members feel safe to speak up, are candid about expectations, and each employee has an awareness of how their personal actions contribute to the common goal.

So, how do you build trust? One of our favorite tools to help teams build trust is Role Analysis.

There are two primary goals of Workplace Role Analysis:

1) Analyze the role of each individual
2) See the effect of each individual’s role on the team

You don’t need a fancy questionnaire or private office rooms for role analysis. In fact, we recommend blocking 2-3 hours in a comfortable setting (Larry’s personal favorite is a brown bag luncheon), so you create a collaborative space outside of your typical work environment.

Send these questions to each member on the team, and begin the discussion yourself, role-modeling the length and amount of detail you want employees to include in their answers (they will naturally follow your lead).

Five Questions for Team Role Analysis:

• Who Am I?
• What is my function within the team?
• What do team members expect of me?
• What do I expect from other team members
• How does my team see me?

Through these questions, your team will have a safe setting to build transparency and candidacy about what they are working towards daily. Instead of playing office politics, people are held to the same standards, clear about what their job is, who is relying on them, and what they can expect from others. This candor about daily workflow approached by first seeing each member as an individual person is essential for shifting the working manager-employee relationship to an adult-to-adult partnership.

Using this foundation of trust built through role analysis, you’ll foster a culture of a highly motivated team, each with extraordinary performances, who work together for a common goal.

What observations can you expect to see show up in your work relationships?

• Working in partnership instead of blind authority
• Open sharing between employee and manager
• Candor and transparency
• Mutual Respect

Do this exercise annually with your team. By focusing on these efforts, not only will your team be more productive, you will see decreased employee turnover and expedited results, improving your daily sense of work satisfaction and your company’s bottom line.