Team Dynamics to Improve Teamwork
Creating a high-performing team is not a simple and easy case. Sometimes performance is still low, results are poor and growth is slow even though the personnel in the team are talented. Therefore, it is very important for a group or team to have ✨good team dynamics✨ to turn the performance around.
What is Team Dynamics?
An influential social psychologist, Kurt Lewin (1939), defines team dynamics as “positive and negative forces within groups of people.” In short, the definition of team dynamics is a system of behavioral and psychological processes that occur within teams.
This means that each team has its own psychology that can affect the behavior and performance of the team. In addition, each personality involved in the group unconsciously determines the direction of group dynamics, whether it is positive or negative.
Why Do We Need to Improve Team Dynamics?
Team dynamics are psychological forces that influence the direction of your team’s performance and behavior. Positive team dynamics occur when team members trust each other, are ready to work collectively, provide support, and exchange ideas productively, and listen to other group members. When a team has positive dynamics, its members are more successful and there is less chance of conflict. In groups with positive dynamics, team members feel comfortable sharing ideas.
A team with poor dynamics includes people whose behavior disrupts the workflow and results in wrong choices, poor decision making, or no decision making at all. All of this results in negative conflict within the team, leaving each participant feeling vulnerable and unwilling to share ideas.
How to Improve Team Dynamics?
Improving team dynamics can be easier with these simple strategies:
Know Your Team — Observe your team. Watch how they communicate and solve problems. Conduct individual interviews with team members. Let them share their feelings about the project and the team they work for. Encourage open discussion.
Quick Feedback — If you see a conflict in your team, you need to resolve it quickly. For this, ask your team members to speak. This can be a private conversation or a group conversation depending on the situation.
Roles & Responsibilities — clear direction helps manage team dynamics. Each team member must understand their task in the project, the overall project objectives, and the direction of project development.
Break Barriers — use team-building activities to increase unity and strengthen relationships.
Communication — let everyone know and share the news quickly. Transparency and effective communication help teams achieve their goals successfully and much more easily.
Team Capacity Building
Capacity building (or capacity development) is the process by which individuals and organizations obtain, improve, and retain the skills, knowledge, tools, equipment, and other resources needed to do their jobs competently.
As mentioned earlier, one strategy to increase team dynamic is to break down barriers by engaging in team-building activities to increase unity and strengthen relationships. Team building is an effort to increase the cohesiveness of the work team with a sense of trust, being able to find solutions to the problems faced, and intensive communication about the role of each team member to carry out a job related to tasks and challenges, working together to build work team.
In developing the IGRI application, my team tried to maximize team dynamics in order to get maximum results in the application development process by doing team building. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are doing online team building. We communicate to get to know each other. Not only that, in developing applications I always get skills from my teammates. The skills that I get at PPL is the ability to work in a team in developing software. I also gain knowledge of how the “real world” works. The knowledge I gained ranged from interactions to the structure of the code itself with teammates.
Team Slogan
A slogan is a catchphrase that represents a product or company and communicates. Team slogan can be used to teach your team about the importance of teamwork. Teamwork is needed to encourage teammates and to achieve common goals. When the skills of each team member are combined, the team becomes unstoppable and can do whatever they want even if the team members have certain abilities. Here are examples of team slogans:
“Together as a team, we can move mountains!”
“Forget ME, Remember WE”
In developing a PPL project, a slogan can encourage teammates to work together to achieve our goals. Even though we don’t have a fixed slogan team, we always encourage each other.
Servant Leader
As written by Robert Greenleaf, servant leadership comes from someone who has a natural desire to serve and then consciously brings someone to lead by placing the needs of his team as a priority and helping others to achieve a common goal. Currently, it is highly recommended that leader qualifications possess the following leadership characteristics:
Patience — One must be patient enough to give full attention to every thought before arriving at the final judgment.
Empathy — Every situation should be handled with the utmost empathy, putting yourself in the other person’s shoes.
Listening skills — Give your full attention to every aspect of what has been said, reflect on it and understand it. It is respectful and wise.
Persuasion — A good leader must have the art of persuading a team. Everyone should have a say and a stake in the success of the team.
