The Most Important Thing You Can Do as a Leader is Instill a Sense of Team

3 actionable ways to cultivate a collective sense of ‘team’

If you’re a team leader, you’re probably used to wearing many hats. Among those demands is the expectation that you will inspire and motivate your people, influence your colleagues, and develop the next generation of leaders. And, while you’re at it, make sure that you stay within budget, outperform your KPIs, and ensure your team does the same. Are we having fun yet?

Perhaps the most important role a leader plays is one that doesn’t get enough attention; the curator of the team. Emerging research in talent management tells us that one of the most important things you’ll do as a leader is to assemble a team and cultivate that team’s sense of oneness.

In early 2020, Marcus Buckingham and the ADP Research Institute released the results of their 19-country study of workplaces worldwide. The results showed that 84% of respondents globally said they do most of their work on a team, and 75% of those respondents said they do their work on more than one team.

Further, this study showed that feeling part of a team is the single greatest driver of employee engagement. Respondents who said they identified as part of a team were 2.3 times more likely to be fully engaged than those who did not.

You might be thinking, “Well, wait a second — of course everyone is part of a team. Just look at the org chart, and you’ll see the teams.”

Not so fast.

Buckingham says that a sense of team is “not a place, but a state of mind.” Just like trust in the team leader, a sense of team is a feeling we get and not something we can necessarily show on a static org chart.

In fact, Buckingham found that most work happens on dynamic teams rather than static ones. “The problem with teams today isn’t how the work happens on them — it’s that we can’t see the teams where the work happens, at all. More and more, our employees are working on teams that aren’t defined by vertical boxes on an org chart,” Buckingham says.

Dynamic teams are simply a group of people who work together to solve a particular problem, irrespective of whether the constraints of an org chart bind them together or not. They could be project teams, cross-functional teams, or matrixed teams.

Dynamic teams are, in fact, where the work gets done and decisions get made. Whether an employee decides to quit or not, whether he feels the investment in his career development is sufficient, whether the company is innovative enough—all of these decisions are made based on an employee’s experience within the dynamic team(s) they’re a part of.

So, as leaders of both static and dynamic teams, how can we actively cultivate this sense of team for our people?

Ashley Goodall, Sr. VP of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco, says that “the best leaders know that the idiosyncrasy of every person is a wonderful thing to be drawn out, that the weirdness of a human being is the best bit. How do you knit weirdness together in the service of something useful? The answer is this splendid piece of technology thousands of years old called the team.”

Here are three ways you can draw out the idiosyncrasy of each person on your team and knit their weirdness together to achieve your collective goals at work.

Learn together

One actionable approach leaders can take is to create space for the team to learn together. This means that rather than sending our employees to attend a training class on communication or collaboration on a one-off basis, we create the opportunity for the team to learn soft skills, like those mentioned above, together.

The problem with individual one-off training, Buckingham says, is that “they are taught these skills in a context completely separate from the teams where they will actually employ them.” Instead, we want to facilitate learning within the context of this team, right now.

I worked for one leader who accomplished this by organizing monthly ‘learning summits’ for our team. At the time, our company was struggling financially, and the group was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a positive outlook. Knowing this, she kicked off the series by choosing a TED Talk about a topic relevant to every team member (the power of positivity) at that exact point in time. This team, right now.

In this case, specifically, she chose what remains one of my all-time favorite TED Talks by Shawn Anchor, The Happy Secret to Better Work.

She asked everyone to watch the video before our discussion and set the expectation that everyone participates by sharing their thoughts on applying what we learned at work. At the end of the first session, she chose a new team member to select the content for next month’s session, and it rotated among team members going forward from there.

Sure, she could have sent us each to a class on maintaining a positive outlook or resilience, but this was a far more powerful solution. It created the opportunity for us to learn something relevant to all of us while also giving us the freedom to explore how we might apply it to our immediate work and situation.

As Buckingham says, “helping each team to understand how it’s doing and to find new approaches rooted in the people on the team and the work in front of them is far more valuable than teaching abstract teaming skills to one person at a time.”

Prioritize experience over location

Many executives have gone on the record this past year concerned about the impact remote work has had on their company culture or sense of collaboration. But would you believe me if I told you that remote teams are actually more engaged than colocated teams?

You don’t have to take my word for it because the research proves it.

23% of workers report that they work from home most of the time, and they turn out to be more engaged than colocated workers — 20% versus 15.8%.

Furthermore, better than half of those remote workers (55%), far from feeling isolated, report that they feel part of a team. And of those who feel like part of a team, 27% are fully engaged at work.

By contrast, only 17% of colocated team members who report they feel part of a team are fully engaged.

This tells us that engagement is about who you work with, not where. As a leader who prioritizes the team experience, your time is best spent helping your team members get to know one another and feel supported by one another.

I worked for one leader who asked everyone to share two simple but deceptively helpful pieces of information each week during our team meetings to achieve this.

First, she asked everyone to share their peak/pit from the week prior. This gave the group a chance to celebrate one another’s wins and offer grace to their struggles.

Second, she asked everyone to either offer or solicit help for the week ahead. If you had a relatively quiet week, make yourself available to help someone with a busy week. If you had a busy week, tell the team where you could use their support.

This exchange of information fortified our collective sense of team because it deepened our understanding of what was going well in each other’s roles and what wasn’t. It clarified how we could offer and receive support regardless of team member location.

Create space to affirm each other’s strengths

Finally, Buckingham is known for an exercise where he asks employees to “spend a week in love with their jobs,” and you can easily do this with your team, too.

Next Monday, ask each employee to make two lists they’ll add to for the week. The first list is their “Love It” list, which is where they will note the work they find themselves looking forward to doing, enjoy doing, or feel energized after completing.

The second list is their “Loathe It” list which is where they will note the work they dread doing, push-off, or struggle to complete because it drains them of their energy.

The following week, bring the team together to discuss. Ask each team member to share the work on both their “Love It” and “Loathe It” lists with the group.

This is the work that I love doing, these are the things that energize me, and these are the areas where the team can lean on me for help.

This is the work I dread doing, these are the things that drain me of my energy, and these are the areas where I will need to lean on the team for help or support.

Create space for the team to discuss, affirm how they have observed each other’s strengths in practice, and offer to support each other’s weaknesses. The beauty of being a part of a team is that for every person who can’t stand doing X, there’s someone else who thrives doing that kind of work.

This discussion, therefore, creates an opportunity to simultaneously build awareness of one another’s strengths and offer support for one another’s weaknesses, facilitating the group’s sense of oneness.

All this to say that perhaps the most important thing you’ll do as a leader is to cultivate your team’s sense of oneness.

The best leaders do this by creating an experience that allows each individual to offer their best work while collectively melding those contributions into something more impactful than what any one person could achieve on their own. Goodall reminds us that,

Teams make weirdness useful. They are a mechanism for integrating the needs of the individual and the needs of the organization. If we can get them right, we solve a lot of problems.

Ultimately, to help our people become fully engaged, we need to help our team leaders see that they are our weirdness orchestrators, our quirk capturers — that theirs is the most important job in our companies that only they can do it.

So, go forth and lead, weirdness orchestrators. Only you can do it.

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