The Importance of Cultivating a Cohesive Team

All of us at sr4 have led teams. We have coached teams. We have recruited teams. We have designed teams. We have been on successful teams. We have been on teams that should have succeeded but didn’t. And we have learned through experience what kind of team is best at getting the job done: not the smartest, not the most experienced, not the most fun, not the most driven…but the most cohesive.

And by cohesive, we mean every member of the team pulling in the same direction, eyes on the same goal, supportive of each other - always showing up and pitching in, never breaking down or opting out.

Our experience is that cohesive in its absolute state is uncommon. Therefore, in our practice, we strive to achieve some degree of something that might somehow remind us of what cohesive could look like, and then we work purposefully to improve on that.

In a mostly remote work environment that defines our current reality, building team cohesion is more important than ever. But what, exactly, does that look like?

We have been encouraged by a study that Google has done in its search for “What makes a Google team effective?” They thought they were looking for who to put on a team to assure stellar performance. What they found was that WHO is on a team matters less than HOW the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.

That’s good news for us, because, typically, we work with teams that are already assembled, already assigned an objective, and already struggling, incohesively, to get started or to drive toward some kind of conclusion. We help them answer three essential questions:

• How are you interacting with each other?

• How are you structuring your work?

• How does each member of the team feel about their ability to contribute toward the common objective?

Embracing and answering those questions leads toward more cohesive teams, and more cohesive teams pave the way to more innovative ideas … more informed decisions…and higher organizational performance. For us, building Cohesive Teams is like working at the cellular level of an organization. It’s the basic building block of what we’re all striving for: a thriving organization.

Putting team Cohesion into Practice

At your next team meeting, ask everyone to think about a time when they were on a team that accomplished something to its full potential. Then ask them to get a partner and tell their stories to each other. Now, the important work in this exercise will be done not by the storyteller, but by the story listener. Because the listener’s job is to jot down what was present in the story that enabled the outcome. Maybe it was trust. Maybe it was the clarity of the objective. Maybe it was the unity of the effort. Maybe it was each member of the team doing what they did best. Make a list of what the listeners observed. Shape that list into categories. Talk about whether there’s cohesion, in your team, around those categories. Then use that list of categories to discuss where you need to focus your time going forward. How can you prioritize the categories that scored strongly?

Building a cohesive team doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and discipline. But once you accomplish it, you’ll reap the rewards and wonder how you ever operated without it.