“I have recently been promoted to director of an operations/administrative division that is made up of three smaller units that have historically worked autonomously. There seems to be a reluctance to work together effectively that never occurred when we worked as three separate divisions. Any suggestions as to how to get the team going as one unit?”
“Teamness” is a term that everyone is touting these days. It is difficult enough to gain team cohesion and cooperation when starting from scratch, but when creating one team that previously has been made up of a number of autonomous units, the barrier to success is much greater.
Before launching into a culture of teamness, togetherness and unity, I suggest you tackle this challenge by focusing on the individual’s role within this newly formed group.
And the best starting point for this exercise comes from two concepts that salespeople (who tend to work outside of the team) practice and pay homage to every day: listening and assumption avoidance.
Listening: Great salespeople are professional listeners. Rather than approach a selling situation ready to pitch an angle, they begin a meeting by surveying the situation.
The best way to do this effectively is to ask questions and to listen to both the communicated and uncommunicated cues.
By standing back, they not only are allowing the prospective customer to get comfortable and establish hierarchy within the meeting, but are also ensuring that they are not making any assumptions before they have enough information to make an intelligent assessment of the required action.
Assumption avoidance: The reason salespeople are so good at listening is survival. Their days are filled with dealing with new people and new situations. Without listening they will inevitably approach a potential customer with a host of assumptions.
Assumptions that are stacked up too early within the communications game can be a deal breaker. Successful salespeople know this and fight against the natural inclination to make assumptions, allowing them to stay flexible and agile enough to react to the unexpected within a given scenario.
This same approach is crucial to internally focused teams.
Begin by communicating to the members of your group that their priority in attending and participating in any meeting is “to listen.”
Once they have tried to understand the needs and goals of the other team members, only then are they to formulate a revised working process that accommodates what they gained from listening.
This will require shedding old habits and releasing some reliable processes that may have successful track records.
But in going through this exercise you are reducing the danger of individual assumption-building, which will undermine any sense of unity within the context of your new team.
Effective team building is neither an easy nor a fast process. But if you communicate the potential pitfalls of not listening and the benefits of assumption avoidance as a starting point, the team you seek will evolve rather than be scripted.
Along the way, you will be amazed at what you learn about your own listening skills and your own (often misguided) assumptions as a leader.
———-
E-mail your comments and questions for Rubin to tribjobs@tribune.com.
