Building an effective team is crucial for success. However, limited resources often pose a significant challenge for small businesses striving to create cohesive and high-performing teams. Despite these constraints, there are strategies that can help small businesses overcome these limitations and foster a culture of trust and collaboration within their teams.
Despite limited resources, small businesses can build effective teams by prioritising trust, embracing healthy conflict, and applying the principles outlined in Lencioni’s model. Investing time and effort into team development is not a luxury but a necessity for sustainable growth and success.
It’s only natural for teams to become dysfunctional. At the end of the day, they are made up of individuals with varied interests, strengths, and weaknesses. Even the most well-intentioned people slip into unproductive and unhealthy behaviour, but leaders can overcome this by ensuring they are instilling the right type of behaviour within a team.
Successful teamwork is not about mastering the subtle sophisticated theories, it’s about combining common sense with levels of discipline and persistence.
Patrick Lencioni, renowned author and organisational consultant, highlights this issue in “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.” Lencioni argues that the fear of conflict and the pursuit of artificial harmony often lead to mediocre results and missed opportunities.
Lencioni’s five dysfunctions – absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results – provide a valuable framework for identifying and addressing areas of improvement. By recognising and addressing these dysfunctions, small businesses can foster a culture of trust, collaboration, and high performance.
Trust lies at the heart of any successful team, irrespective of its size. In small businesses, where every team member plays a critical role, trust becomes even more paramount. Trust doesn’t mean being able to keep secrets but instead showing vulnerabilities and knowing that the team will have each other’s back.
Leaders need trust in the team to know that you can have conflict, and in fact, conflict is welcomed but not being afraid of conflict leads to better outcomes for business. Without trust, a team can become fragmented, stifling creativity and hindering progress. Small businesses should prioritise trust-building initiatives such as a murder mystery party or ice breakers to nurture an environment where team members feel safe to voice their opinions, take risks, and challenge the status quo.
However, one common pitfall that small businesses must avoid is falling into the trap of artificial harmony. It is easy to confuse agreement with consensus, as disagreements can be uncomfortable and time-consuming to resolve. But failure to address underlying conflicts and embrace diverse perspectives can undermine the very foundation of a team.
From there, small businesses must ensure that team members feel a sense of commitment and ownership towards shared goals. This can be achieved by involving team members in decision-making processes, providing clarity of purpose, recognising, and celebrating individual and collective achievements.
Fostering accountability within the team is crucial, whether that is setting clear expectations, roles, or responsibilities, each team member should be established in the team. This can be further encouraged by regular check-ins and performance evaluations holding everyone accountable for their actions and nurturing a culture of continuous improvement.
Finally, small businesses should never lose sight of the ultimate goal – achieving results. By aligning team goals with the overall business objectives, small businesses can motivate their teams to strive for excellence. A team that is not focused on achieving team results can become complacent or disengaged, leading to a lack of motivation and productivity.
While there will be challenges for small businesses in building effective teams, by nurturing a culture of trust, fostering healthy conflict, and encouraging accountability and commitment, small businesses can unlock the full potential of their teams and achieve remarkable results.
