Team collaboration is part and parcel of work. Studies show people working in teams are often more productive, are happier at work, and likely to achieve better results. Collaboration can drive competitiveness and business advantage.

What are the 7 Habits of Effective Project Teams?

Creating a team that works well together requires effort and planning. It’s not enough to put a group of people together, call them a team, and hope for the best. You need to cultivate the right skills and habits to support team collaboration.

Some common habits characterize great teams. Here are seven highly effective habits to adopt for your next project team

1. Clear Goals

Well-defined project goals that are measurable, challenging, clearly communicated, and agreed upon by each member are key to success.

Goals help project team members connect their work to the big picture and guide the team through challenges. Teams motivated to complete a common goal often perform 5 times better than their counterparts.

Consider the following to reach a group consensus on the goal:

• Host a workshop to discuss project objectives, measures of success, and individual responsibilities.
• Use a collaborative project management tool and hold regular team meetings to keep everyone focused on the goal and track progress.
• Understand the positive impact of individual contributions to increase collaboration and communication.

Building Commitment to Goals

Commitment to the objective is just as important as setting it. A team thrives when members prioritize collaboration over individual agendas and contribute on time to drive progress.

Help team members identify both their own goals for the coming months and connect these to the project’s objectives to increase motivation and accountability.

In this video, BrightWork CSA, Scott Footlik explains how to create a one-page plan to improve project team performance. The plan includes goals, tasks, and success metrics in one easy-to-access file.

2. Psychological Safety

Wondering why some teams performed better than others, Google researchers studied over 180 teams and found psychological safety— a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking’’— was a key factor in team success.

We all make mistakes or want to try something different occasionally. Viewing failure as a mistake discourages innovation. We must embrace risks and mistakes to fall upward and become more resilient as individuals and as a team.

How to Promote Psychological Safety

Some suggestions for developing psychological safety include:

• Feedback sessions
• A focus on continual learning and improvement
• Problem-solving

Psychological safety also removes our ‘work face’ – the tendency to act like someone else – in favor of human interactions and honesty.

Empathy, sensitivity, emotion, active listening, and open communication build trust and should not be neglected in a data-driven business environment.

Simple actions like small talk and off-site team lunches can make a significant difference in creating a supportive team dynamic.

3. Roles and Responsibilities

Another finding from Google’s research is the value of clear roles and responsibilities. Roles define how the team works together and ensure individual skills are fully utilized.

Team members must adhere to their defined roles; otherwise, you may have three people working on a similar task while others are neglected. Defining roles and responsibilities early on increases transparency and accountability.

The project manager’s leadership ensures the team never questions who is doing what. Everyone should know they can rely on each other to get the work done.

How to Define Roles

A RACI matrix is a useful way to document roles and responsibilities with your management team. RACI refers to:

• Responsible – the person who completes the task.
• Accountable – the individual who makes sure the work is completed.
• Consulted – subject matter experts who provide the advice needed to complete the work.
• Informed – anyone who needs to be kept up-to-date about the project.

Other useful tools include the Project Team Wheel, Circle Dot Chart, and the Global Teams Map.

A study of collective intelligence by Dr. Anita Williams Woolley recommends hiring a balanced team with neither very strong nor very weak performers to set egalitarian norms. She argues this approach will distribute work more equally so everyone feels engaged and involved.

4. Strong Leadership

Leadership is required at every stage of successful project management. Incorporating project management coaching can help effective project managers develop key skills to drive collaboration and performance.

• Establish team norms
• Create and share a compelling vision
• Set clear goals
• Delegate tasks to suitable team members
• Communicate effectively
• Manage conflict
• Remove blockers
• Celebrate project success
• Provide relevant training

These help enable high-performing teams to deliver results.

5. Communication

We all know that communication is the key to a successful project. Let’s think about communication from another angle – who is talking?

Studies show that ‘equal conversational taking’ is a key habit of highly effective teams. Even if the frequency of conversation varies, equal participation leads to better performance.

Overcoming Communication Barriers in Teams

Create a communication plan to support regular interaction via meetings, emails, feedback sessions, reports, and presentations. This advice also applies to virtual teams. Address communication barriers to ensure your team’s dynamics support positive collaboration.

Dominant personalities and a fear of conflict can inhibit communication, making it important to learn how to handle disagreements in a team. If your team is silent or having one-sided conversations, you need to do something about it!

Consider the different communication styles of each team member to make communications more inclusive and establish meeting practices to give everyone a voice.

6. Team Emotional Intelligence

When looking at what makes teams successful, we tend to focus on individual attributes rather than how the team works together.

However, organizations often find putting the best people on a team does not yield successful project outcomes, as the individuals simply can’t work together.

Emotional Skills for Teams

Emotional intelligence is a useful predictor of individual and team performance. It refers to an individual’s ability to recognize their emotions and understand how these emotions impact others.

Team emotional intelligence is the ability of a group to manage and harness emotions for positive outcomes.

Why Emotional Intelligence Matters

In Daniel Goleman’s book: ‘Working with Emotional Intelligence’, he emphasizes that each of us only has part of the skills and knowledge we need to do our jobs. We have to collaborate with others to deliver results, which creates the need for emotionally intelligent teams.

These teams are defined by empathy, cooperation, strong relationships with other teams, and the ability to achieve ‘flow.’

Improving team emotional intelligence boosts collaboration, problem-solving, confidence, and flexibility.

7.  Processes and Templates

Effective teams develop best practices and approaches, leading to consistent success. Using processes and templates is useful because:

• They ensure work is carried out consistently and understood by all team members.
• Having these elements in place means work can continue if someone leaves or joins the team.
• They increase the accountability of individual team members by promoting transparency in how work is managed and completed.

A project management software like BrightWork helps team members track and report on their work, use forums to solve problems, and build a knowledge base for future projects.

Building the Foundation for Success

Not sure if you need to consider working on these habits? Below are some common identifiers of dysfunctional teams. Is your team falling into any of these traps?

• Unclear goals or purpose
• Poor or unclear communication, for example, too much jargon
• Overly dominant personalities
• Fear of speaking up or challenging an idea
• Overlapping tasks while critical work is delayed
• Reliance on last-minute efforts to achieve success
• No reporting or progress reviews
• Low levels of engagement and interaction

If you are wondering where to start, begin with goals. A well-defined goal and objective gives your team focus, shapes the project, and aligns individual roles and responsibilities.  Providing this clarity to your team will elevate their performance.