Building Teams and Smashing Silos

Graham
Aug 29
5 min read

Updated: Sep 1

You've joined team-building events, contributed enthusiastically to the cross-department project, perhaps even worked within a matrix structure. But how would you rate the quality of teamwork and collaboration in your company?

When I ask human resource professionals this question at the start of my teamwork keynotes, I'm always surprised by the response. Very rarely does anyone give their company a score above 8 out of 10. The most common scores are 6 or below.

It's not a small problem. The success of our organizations depends on the ability of people to work together, and billions are spent every year trying to cajole people into getting along. These efforts focus on elements such as psychological safety, communication and feedback. What's missing is a shared sense of purpose.

Do I know you?

Some jobs may focus on individual contributions, but in general, humanity makes plans and then collaborates on making them happen.

The problem is that we need to organize people, and to do that we put them in to groups, creating two problems.

Graham Norris is a much sought-after teamwork speaker who is often booked up months in advance due to his unique insights. Please get in touch with Graham as early as you can in your planning, so you can secure his presence at your event and get his input into your planning process.

Graham's Teamwork Keynote

First, we need to bring people together who have very different views of the world. Diversity is great, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Getting people to work together in a team is perhaps the No. 1 challenge managers face. Mediating disputes and trying to find the holy grail of synergy is what I, as a new manager, found particularly daunting.

Second, we need some of the people in our team to work with people in other teams. If we've done a sterling job of building our team, we may also unfortunately be playing into the hands of tribal identity psychology, that of in-group and out-groups. Strong tribal bonds may have kept us alive in the past, but they are massively counterproductive in a company.

The answer to these problems: Vision.

The Egyptians would be jealous

I think of visions in an organization as being in a pyramid. At the top, we have the organizational vision. Many organizations don't have a vision, and those that do might just have a well-crafted but otherwise vacuous vision statement. Yet when an organization has a strong vision – think Tesla, Patagonia or Feed the Children – it can be a massively motivating force for its employees.

At the base of the pyramid are the individuals, who all have their own visions. They may, of course, not call them that – they might more likely use language such as dream, aspiration, ambition, maybe purpose or why. But there's a big difference in the motivational levels of people who have a clear and compelling vision of who they want to be, and those who don't.

What if we could find a way to create the same motivating power of a vision, but at the team level in the middle?

You can, employing what in psychology is called collaborative imagination. It's the ability of two or more people to engage their imaginations to generate a shared vision of the future. A shared sense of purpose.

I know what you're thinking

The research on this is amazing.

Say you're planning a picnic with a friend for next weekend. One of you could start by choosing a place, say the beach. The other might talk about how sunny and warm it is, and you continue taking it in turns to describe what kind of food to bring, the games you want to play, and so on.

The magic of generating a vision together like this is the connection it creates. Research shows that this process of building a shared visions also makes the people involved feel more connected to each other. Building the vision builds the relationship.

Yet there's one more remarkable product of collaborative imagination. Those who build a vision together not only feel more connected to each other, they also feel more connected to the vision they create than visions they create on their own.

That's right. They were more bought in to the collective vision, and we can use this in our organizations to address those two problems.

Creating a Team Dream

The first thing we can do is create team visions. Each team is like its own organization, so why not give them each a vision? A Team Dream. Let me give you an example.

As a facilitator, I helped a marketing department in a medium-sized organization create their Team Dream over three mornings. The challenge was that the rest of the organization engaged with the marketing department after they'd developed their products, meaning the team was always on the back foot, feeling rushed and handling last-minute problems.

First, we looked at their individual visions. What were their dreams and aspirations for their work? This recognized the diversity of individuals sitting at the table, and helped build rapport as they learnt new things about each other.

Second, we looked at the organizational vision. It didn't have much of a vision, which was part of the reason we were creating one for the team, but there were expressions of intention we could work with. The importance of this step was that everyone had their own interpretation of what the organization was trying to achieve, and it was useful to find the areas of agreement.

Finally, we created the team vision. It described what the world could look like, what would be happening, what the team and its members would be doing, and what all their stakeholders would be doing. The vision they came up with was based on the concept of an organization with a marketing mindset. This meant that the other departments had marketing top of mind when developing their products, and they were engaging the marketing department at the start. Marketing became baked in to everything people did. This meant the marketing team could do their best work, supporting their own as well as the organization's effectiveness.

Yes, and...

The second problem is how to make sure that team cohesion doesn't work against successful collaboration across teams.

How to achieve that? The idea is the same. We want to understand other people's visions, figure out what we want, and then build together.

If there is some conflict due to silos or turf wars, it's important to try to help people escape the constraints of the present so they can experience the possibilities of the future.

In the present, we may care very deeply that I'm on this team and you're on that team. But in the future, anything is possible. You might be in their team, they might be in yours, the teams might have merged or even disappeared.

We are limited by our current thinking, whereas we can become liberated by futures thinking.

There are lots of ways to achieve this, but a useful tool is the improvisational theatre technique called "Yes, and..." Simply put, you take what someone else has just said and build on it in turns, just like we did when imagining the picnic. The key point is that you're acknowledging what the other person has said, trying to be constructive about it, before adding your own thoughts. Beach volleyball might not be your thing, but that just means you're going to bring a frisbee too.

You can see how you don't need to be in the same team as someone to create a compelling vision of the future together – you don't even need to like them. You both just need to be committed to listening to each other and creating a shared vision.

An easy sell

Leadership means creating motivating, shared visions of the future and helping others work together in making these visions a reality. By tapping into people's imaginations, we can create more meaningful futures that everyone can buy into.

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