Teamwork is a cornerstone of business – often regardless of which role that any given person finds themselves in. It’s easy enough to demand that your team members practice strong teamworking skills, but without fostering the right environment for them to do so, this might be difficult.
As a manager, you have a specific role to play in helping to encourage this team collaboration. There is an art to it that might not be your first instinct. The more abrasive and direct approaches might not always result in the happiest working environments, and that could come back to bite you in many ways, including with a higher staff turnover than you need to have.
Work With Them
It’s important to remember that you are a part of this process. Rather than being a distinct entity whose sole purpose is to oversee operations, you are a part of the working process. Even if you’re not directly involved in the operations of any given department, your employees might constantly be coming to you so that they can discuss issues or ask for help with more administrative issues.
Of course, you can be more involved if you want to be. However, it’s important to understand when you’re helping and when you’re hindering. It’s natural that you might want to be involved with what’s going on with your business, but if you lack the expertise of the other members of the department, you might be interfering more than you realize.
Be Flexible
Sometimes, your employees are going to come to you with ideas or suggestions that don’t initially sound like the route that you would think to take to improving their team collaboration. Firstly, it’s important to remember that you might be lacking the technical skills that would lead to this suggestion feeling like a natural one, but it’s also important to have some patience. If you ask them the questions that you have, you can help them to help you understand. For example, if they’re trying to encourage you to invest in APIs for the sake of your websites, apps, or other digital platforms, it might be a tool that you’ve never heard of. You can ask them about it, but you might also do some reading into API news and other research that can help you to gain a more thorough understanding.
Trust Them
As their employer, it can feel as though you have to interfere in their working habits if you’re hoping to influence the result. However, this might not be the case, and the ability of your team to work together might flourish if it’s given space to do so without you. That being said, it’s only in the areas of obvious involvement that this might be true; you can still have a positive and indirect influence by creating a workspace where they feel comfortable collaborating with each other and able to deliver their best work.
A trusting work environment can help your team members feel as though they can work with each other in whatever feels most natural to them. Not everyone has the same working style, after all, and a willingness on your end to cater to this variety can be enormously beneficial.
