Spencer Schar: Encouraging Collaboration and Cohesion in Business Teams

Spencer Schar serves as company president of The Club at Bella Collina, overseeing day-to-day activities and strategic planning. This article will look at team collaboration, providing strategies to increase cohesion in workforces – paving the way for innovation and commercial success.

According to a report by Forbes, 80% of companies agree that profits are directly driven by a growth mindset among employees. From a company’s inception through its establishment, scaling, and expansion, mindset can make a huge difference to corporate success. With new technologies shaping modern workforces, a growth mindset helps leaders to understand and harness the latest tools, boosting operational efficiency and success. Mentality is crucial, particularly during the early stages of the company’s lifecycle, when “revenue is vanity” but “profit is sanity.” Although founders need to focus on cash and turnover, mindset has a game-changing impact on a business’s trajectory.

With five generations working side-by-side, business leaders need better strategies to cope with the challenges of global and hybrid work and increased political polarization. To build engagement and drive results, employers must focus on shared goals, use inclusive language, and allocate resources fairly, as well as encouraging constructive criticism.

Where each team member focuses solely on their own respective duties, this creates scope for silos to form, leaving the team at a collective risk of missing the bigger picture. Leaders must emphasize collective goals that require cross-departmental collaboration, ensuring everyone understands how their responsibilities contribute to the business’s overall success, thereby improving collaboration.

Using inclusive language can be an effective means of modelling inclusivity, reducing internal competition, boosting morale, and encouraging others to follow. Shifting from a “they” to a “we” mentality transforms mindsets. Similarly, using phrases like “our organization” and “our team” fosters a sense of unity.

Fair allocation of resources helps to stave off resentment, ensuring that every team and its members enjoy access to tools they need to succeed. Distributing resources equitably helps to instill a sense of fairness and trust, helping team members to stay focused on shared goals rather than competing with each other for resources.

By fostering a work culture of openness and transparency, employers ensure that team members feel safe offering feedback, creating opportunities to gather valuable business insights that could help leaders identify areas ripe for improvement. Creating a space that feels psychologically safe is conducive to innovation and trust, two vital elements for high-performing teams.

Creating effective working teams depends on multiple factors, requiring high levels of communication and trust. Cracking the code of team cohesion is critical to organizational success, with teams generating value as a primary unit of performance at most companies. More empowered, autonomous, dynamic, and collaborative than in traditional organizational models, many teams still struggle to collaborate effectively. For example, research shows that three out of four cross-functional teams underperform in key metrics.

Team failure or success is often attributed to individuals, particularly the team leader. However, while upskilling team leaders is helpful, it is simply not enough to guarantee performance. When addressing team effectiveness, organizations typically focus primarily on leadership teams. This is understandable, as companies whose leadership team has a shared and meaningful vision are almost twice as likely to have above-average financial performance. Nevertheless, teams at the top should never be the sole focus, with cross-functional initiatives sitting at the middle of the organization requiring more support to succeed.

To create agile project teams and networks, businesses must support workers at all levels. Less of an art and more of a science, team effectiveness depends on the success of the whole rather than the performance of its individual parts, requiring a collective capacity to deliver results.