One of the most important ways to build teamwork is to encourage trust. You don’t have to be best friends with someone on your team and you don’t need to share anything in common. But if you can trust them to have your back, then you’ll be motivated to support them as well. You can encourage this with ‘trust exercises’ but by putting your team in positions where they are forced to rely on each other to succeed. You also need to encourage open communication and openness in general – and you should endeavor to give the team the chance to become personally acquainted so that they know more about one another.

Remember earlier that we said you shouldn’t offer individual incentives in order to avoid negative competition within your teams? That still holds true and you should certainly avoid creating an environment where it pays to step on the toes of your colleagues.

But what’s more is that you can do the opposite by giving goals for your whole team. Having numbers of sales up on the board, or better yet a customer satisfaction score, can help to remind your team why they’re there and to work together toward that common objective. Likewise, giving individual members within the team the credit and autonomy to work on their own aspects, will further help them to be intrinsically motivated and to help their fellow teammates along the way.

One thing to avoid is allowing smaller cliques to form within your organization. You don’t want one group of ‘smokers’, the older generation and ‘accounting’. While your team will naturally be formed of smaller subsets, cliques can be destructive. Solve this by breaking up destructive relationships by moving the seating and by forcing more interaction between departments.

Teamwork between different departments is as important – if not more important – than teamwork within departments. This is another reason to move things around and to encourage individuals to spend time in other groups. If someone from sales spends a few days sitting with the marketing team, then they’ll not only become less part of their ‘sales team boy’s club’ but will also be more likely to better understand and respect the role of marketing.

From the book:

👉📚The Enlightened Manager: A Comprehensive Guide To Leadership, is now available on Amazon!

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