Unlocking Team Potential: Effective Collaboration Overcomes Common Pitfalls

It is often said that success or failure at work—engagement or disengagement; motivation or lack of motivation—is tied to one’s manager or senior leadership. But the same can be said of one’s team. Effective teams are a primary driver of organizational success. Yet research shows that poor collaboration and misaligned individual and team behaviors are resulting in significant productivity and performance losses.

“How team members relate to each other and collaborate across boundaries such as functional lines, physical distance, or expertise is key to optimizing team effectiveness,” said Rob Cross, professor of global leadership at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., and senior vice president of research at i4cp, a human capital research firm based in Seattle.

Research from i4cp shows an average 39% productivity loss among teams due to poor collaboration. That loss jumps to 60% for the least effective teams. “Teams are gold mines of untapped productivity,” Cross said.

He added that part of the problem is how workforce performance is typically managed. “Most organizations focus on recognizing and rewarding performance at the individual level as opposed to the team level, even though employees work mostly in teams,” he said. “Compounding the issue, most leaders are not trained on how to manage and optimize team effectiveness and are much more comfortable providing individual feedback, rather than focusing on understanding and improving team dynamics.”

Teams have their own personalities that are distinct from the personalities of individual team members. One way to improve team effectiveness is to assess team behaviors, said Christopher Morrison, co-founder and CEO of TeamDynamics, whose eponymous tool helps employers understand how their teams communicate and collaborate.

TeamDynamics measures four core dimensions of team behavior:

• Communication. Do teams share information through defined processes or informally?
• Process. Do teams rely on sources of information or evaluate that information?
• Decision-making. Do team leaders make decisions, or do team members make group decisions?
• Execution. Do teams follow plans closely, or is execution more agile and adaptable?

The company analyzed thousands of aggregated, anonymized responses to its survey instruments over the past 12 months and found that teams overall exhibit a preference toward communicating informally; processing information analytically; making decisions by consensus; and executing adaptable plans.

But TeamDynamics also found that 91% of people have individual preferences that differ from at least one of their team’s core behaviors, and 69% have preferences that differ from at least two of their team’s behaviors. Only 9% of people have preferences that align with all four core team behaviors.

“That translates to a vast majority of people feeling stressed when working with their teams,” Morrison said. “People are expending extra energy to figure out how to modulate the way they work to fit in on their team. They’re not able to focus on doing their best work.”

Morrison said having different work preferences is OK, and the team can still excel, but its effectiveness requires an awareness of the particular points of tension and the application of techniques to shift individual behaviors to better align with the team’s behavior.

Overcoming Team Dysfunction

Jennifer Dulski is CEO and founder of Rising Team, a software-as-a-service platform that equips managers with tools and training to build engaged and connected teams. She said various factors contribute to team dysfunction, including challenges from remote and hybrid work, increased workloads due to layoffs or organizational changes, and the multi-generational nature of teams.

“By helping managers foster greater trust, understanding, and clarity within their teams, they can overcome both internal company challenges and difficult external and competitive dynamics,” Dulski said. “Teams that are clear on their purpose and have high trust are more resilient, less dysfunctional, and more successful overall.” 

i4cp examined common team dysfunctions and found that the most frequently cited one was priority overload, or when excessive and conflicting goals are set by too many stakeholders.  

“Organizations over the last 10 to 15 years have become flatter and more agile, which has helped foster more collaboration,” Cross said. “But one of the unintended consequences is too many asks of teams that don’t have the ability to prioritize in the moment. Teams end up taking on too many things, which has a negative impact.”

Practicing prioritizing in the moment has worked for i4cp clients, Cross said. He noted that at one company, a manager came to the team with too many demands. The manager and the team started associating every request with an impact-to-effort grid.

“They would start talking about it, and the manager realized that reflecting on his asks and prioritizing them helped him understand the magnitude of collaboration that had to happen around his requests,” Cross explained. “They took that idea and propagated it throughout all the teams, which has been very effective.”

When it’s a group of different stakeholders causing priority overload, “you can bring them together, either physically or virtually, and list out all the asks, identifying the capabilities of the team,” he said. “The stakeholders can then decide which requests should be prioritized. What I often hear is that as the stakeholders are pushed into a forum that has them making the trade-offs, instead of just putting it on the team leader, they figure out how to adjust what they really need to get the most done.”

TeamDynamics looked at another common team disconnect: the execution of plans. Seventy percent of people prefer that their teams execute projects using detailed plans, but just 27% of teams actually do so.

“Most people would rather have detailed plans and predictable timelines, but most teams don’t deliver on this, which is a reflection of how work is done,” Morrison said. “Things are so fast-moving that in most cases, it is impractical to invest too much in building and maintaining detailed timelines. I don’t think it is realistic to change the broader contextual factors of work, but companies can be more intentional about the right level of specificity of detail in executing plans, they can provide teams with more context about why that is the right level of detail, and they can help team members build the skills around agility and flexibility to better deal with the nature of how work needs to be done.”

The solution to all team dysfunction is an awareness of the disconnects and a consequent give-and-take, he said. Once the behaviors of the team and the individual members are realized, the team can better understand and support individuals while members can shift their own behavior to better gel with the team.

Dulski shared several best practices to improve team communication and execution:

• Foster open and honest dialogue by creating an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas and concerns. Encourage regular check-ins and feedback sessions where everyone can voice their thoughts.
• Promote active listening to build mutual respect and ensure that everyone’s voice is valued. “This means fully engaging with what others are saying, asking clarifying questions, and reflecting back on what you’ve heard before responding,” she said.
• Set time for collaboration and team building. Dulski recommended employers invest time in team-building activities that help team members get to know one another on a deeper level and improve their ability to work together effectively. “Strong interpersonal relationships enhance communication and collaboration,” she said.
• Create a culture of “feedforward.” “Feedforward centers on what can be done differently in the future [as opposed to] feedback, which critiques past actions,” Dulski explained. “This approach helps team members understand how they can improve and apply those insights moving forward, fostering a more positive and forward-thinking mindset.”

The Role of the Team Leader

TeamDynamics found that only 30% of team leaders understand how their team works. “We were floored by that,” Morrison said. “How much better could work performance and job satisfaction be if every manager knew how their team worked?”

And managers are only slightly more likely than team members to have preferences that match with their teams, he said. “That means managers are not nearly as influential in setting the team’s tone as one might think.”

But Dulski noted that team managers are still pivotal in shaping team performance and overall success. She said managers can boost team performance by:

• Setting clear goals and expectations. Ensuring that everyone understands their responsibilities and how their work contributes to the overall objectives helps minimize misunderstandings and keeps everyone focused on shared goals.
• Fostering a positive team culture. “Cultivate an environment where team members feel valued, respected, and motivated,” Dulski said. “This encourages collaboration, creativity, and a strong sense of community. Understanding each individual team member’s natural talents and working style preferences goes a long way towards helping people feel understood and valued.”
• Recognizing and rewarding contributions can greatly boost morale and motivation. “In particular, the managers who understand each person’s unique preferences for how they like to be appreciated can really make a difference in how people feel being part of the team,” she said.
• Creating an environment of psychological safety. “When managers openly acknowledge their vulnerabilities and moments of struggle, it sets a precedent for the team, encouraging members to take risks and innovate without the fear of negative consequences,” Dulski said.