If you walked around a room full of people and asked what they thought the word ‘team’ meant you’re sure to get quite a few different answers. What does it mean to you?
How about a team being a group of people who pool their talents and creativity to achieve a common goal? Each person brings with them different abilities, experience, backgrounds and perspectives.
The best teams are able to develop ideas through open and frank discussions, and collaborate freely and enthusiastically. They may even become dependent on each other’s expertise and unique skills to create, improve and implement ideas and decisions for the team.
This all sounds great, but is it that easy?
Teams and Collaboration
One of the major advantages of a team is the power of collaboration. When people work together on problems each person brings a different view and interpretation and this usually generates better ideas and solutions.
The key to collaboration is to open the way for ideas to come from everyone. To be successful a team needs to create and work in an environment where each person’s ideas, knowledge, perspective , even wild and crazy notions, are all welcome. No-one is worried about being embarrassed or disapproved of.
When team collaboration is working well everyone listens closely to each other. They build on each other’s ideas, they modify them, they may even drop them then pick them up again and come up with new ideas. It shouldn’t be a competitive exercise and everyone should feel comfortable enough to offer half formed ideas which might go nowhere or may also ignite a brainstorm of ideas and possibilities.
Unfortunately there are also unintentional and subtle ways teams can send the message to someone their idea isn’t really suitable or wanted. Have you said or been told:
- “We tried that already”
- “It won’t work”
- “Are you kidding?”
- “That’s just plain stupid”
- “That’s not what we had in mind”
If you’ve had that said to you it doesn’t feel very good does it? Besides having a potentially great idea squashed, it also makes you think twice about putting an idea forward or even saying much in the future.
Teams, whether intentionally or not, shouldn’t kill new ideas before they’ve even had a chance to develop — it doesn’t make sense. New ideas should be nurtured by making some positive and favourable comment to encourage continued flow of creative ideas.
It’s also extremely important to really listen to what’s being said and follow up interesting or unusual comments with probing questions. This is what team collaboration is all about!
Teams and Creativity
As children we play in imaginary worlds where anything is possible. Over time we learn to keep those possibilities and ideas inside. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, many of us learn to be sensitive (sometimes overly so) to what others think of our ideas and the way we express them. We’re concerned what is playful and fun to us could be viewed by other people as silly and unbusinesslike.
But for teams to be creative they need to get back to that. Teams need everyone to put their mental gymnastics cap on and stretch their imaginations going beyond the obvious. Most people will do that triple somersault and rise to the challenge if you ask them to. Sounds simple doesn’t it — it’s as if we need permission to be creative!
To get the best out of the team aim for quantity of ideas rather than quality — a volume of thought gets everyone talking and feeding off each other. The energy levels increase and there is excitement in the air.
Don’t be discouraged if ideas come slowly at first, people need time to think. And it’s very important to avoid being critical of ideas as they are being formed. Once out there, ideas can be refined and examined from every aspect and angle. Focus on how ideas can be improved, changed or used.
