clarity | Human-Centered Change and Innovation

1. Clarity

Clarity within a team is about ensuring that every member comprehends their roles and responsibilities, tasks, and deadlines. When team members have a clear understanding of what is expected of them and their teammates, they are more engaged, more productive, and even more collaborative. Clarity also allows individuals to operate within their sweet spot of capabilities, avoiding boredom or feeling overwhelmed.

One activity that can establish and maintain clarity on a team is the regular huddle. A huddle is a short, sync-up session where team members answer questions like, “What did I just complete? What am I focused on next? What’s blocking my progress?” These questions help everyone stay aligned, distribute tasks, set deadlines, and offer support when needed. Huddles promote transparency and keep everyone accountable, making it easier to identify issues and slackers without micromanaging.

2. Empathy

Empathy within a team means understanding the perspectives, strengths, weaknesses, work preferences, and factors that influence each team member’s behavior. This deeper understanding leads to reduced conflicts and enhanced collaboration. Team members who empathize with one another can tailor their communication and actions to suit the needs and preferences of their colleagues.

A powerful tool for building empathy in a team is creating “Manuals of Me.” In this activity, each team member provides insights into themselves by answering four fill-in-the-blank questions: “I’m at my best when_____. I’m at my worst when_____. You can count on me to_____. What I need from you is_____.” These manuals shed light on individual characteristics, strengths, and preferences, helping team members understand each other better.

The Manuals of Me exercise is an invaluable tool for addressing conflicts and on-boarding new team members. By sharing these manuals with the entire team and discussing how they can adapt their behavior based on the information, a team can build empathy and trust.

Building common understanding through clarity and empathy is the foundation of high-performing teams. It fosters a sense of unity and shared purpose, helping team members leverage each other’s unique skills and talents to achieve common goals. By fostering clarity and empathy in your team, you can build a strong common understanding that drives collaboration, reduces conflict, and helps everyone do their best work ever.

Image credit: Pixabay

Originally published on DavidBurkus.com on October 16, 2023

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3 Secrets To Good Teamwork

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Teams are how work gets done most of the time. In a knowledge work economy, up to 85% of an average employee’s time is spent in collaboration with other people—on one team or on multiple teams. And that makes effective collaboration and good teamwork a top tier skill. Whether you’re currently a leader or looking to become a leader, focusing on developing your teamwork skills—and the level of teamwork on your team—is one of the highest returns on effort you can experience.

In this article, we’ll outline three keys to good teamwork and offer a few practical ways to improve on each one.

1. Clarity

The first key to good teamwork is clarity. Teammates need a clear set of tasks and objectives, and also to be clear on the tasks others are focused on. They need to be able to depend on the team to deliver on commitments and be clear about how their deliverables fit into the larger whole. In addition, teams need clarity on each others knowledge, skills, abilities, strengths and weaknesses. They need to know who the subject matter expert is for any given task and who is still developing that skill in order to properly assign tasks…and to ask the right person for help from time to time.

There are a number of ways to establish clarity when beginning a project, but teams also need to be deliberate about maintaining clarity as the project rolls out and the fog of work sets in. One effective way to do that is through a “huddle”—a regular, and fast paced meeting where teammates gather and report on what they’ve completed, where their focus is now, and where they might need help. Overtime, this routine will help everyone know what’s happening, but also who is excelling at what tasks and how they can help each other.

2. Empathy

The second key to good teamwork is empathy. If clarity is about understanding the tasks, empathy is about understanding the people on the team. Teammates need to know about each other’s different work preferences, personalities, and routines. Without empathy, we tend to assume our teammates will think and act like us—and when they don’t it can create conflict and confusion. And the more diverse a team, the more important empathy becomes on the team.

There are a variety of ways to build empathy but one of the most effective is through crafting and revising a team charter—or ways of working, group norms, rules of the road, and a host of other names. The idea behind a team charter is to facilitate a conversation about all the taken-for-granted assumptions about collaboration the team may have—like proper email response time, reasons to call meetings, ways to make decisions, etc. As they discuss, the team arrives at a set of norms they can agree to and then they abide by those norms for a few months before revisiting and revising based on what was learned. Empathy isn’t created by having the document, but rather in the process of having all those discussions.

3. Safety

The third key to good teamwork is safety—as in psychological safety. The level of mutual trust and respect felt on a team has a massive effect on the team’s ability to perform. If teammates feel safe to speak up, share ideas, or admit failures than the quality of their conversations and collaboration improves dramatically. Without psychological safety teams struggle to achieve a growth mindset and to learn and grow—and that puts a ceiling on the performance they’ll experience.

One fast way to start building psychological safety on a team is to signal vulnerability by asking for feedback. This is especially effective for leaders who can send individual emails out to each teammate asking just two simple questions:

What’s something I do well I should do more of?
What’s something you wish I would stop doing?

Because every teammate will have different answers, leaders will need to synthesize all the answers before they can apply anything learned. But the very action of asking for such honest feedback will signal to the team that their leader wants transparency. Over time that transparency will grow the feeling of psychological safety—especially once the team sees their feedback being applied.

And once psychological safety on the team grows, it will be easier to grow empathy as well. And when safety and empathy are high, teammates give more honest status updates in their huddles and clarity grows as well. As all three of these keys to good teamwork grow, the team’s performance will grow, because the team will become a place where everyone feels like they can do their best work ever.