What to Do When Team Collaboration Fails: A Manager’s Guide

“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the strength of the team.”

When people work together, it is inevitable that sooner or later, there may be disagreements. When colleagues disagree, it may affect morale and productivity. Fortunately, some smart strategies ensure team collaboration at the workplace.

A skillful manager with conflict resolution abilities can successfully resolve situations to ensure team members feel heard, motivated, and respected to continue delivering their best performances.

Strategies to Improve Team Collaboration

Ensuring team collaboration requires time and effort, which may be difficult, especially for first-time managers. However, it is important to boost creativity, morale, and productivity of the team and the organization. A teamwork and collaboration training program can help them develop new skills and strategies to boost collaboration.

1. Open and Transparent Communication

Collaboration happens when everyone is comfortable putting across their ideas, perspectives, and thoughts. Managers must encourage open and transparent communication to ensure their team members participate and bring innovative solutions to the workplace. Managers must provide a safe environment to encourage people to speak freely and share their ideas without the fear of retribution. There may be disagreements, but open and transparent communication is crucial to unlock team collaboration.

2. Recognize and Reward Good Performance

Team members are motivated by justice and objectivity from their leaders. Recognition and rewards lead to a sense of positivity and encourage all team members to also enhance their performance. Moreover, investing in upskilling team members to offer professional development not only helps people to improve their performance but also strengthens overall team performance. When people feel valued and are given opportunities to develop their skills fosters an organizational culture of commitment and improvement.

3. Effective Management of Resources

First-time manager training programs help participants to effectively manage resources to avoid conflicts. It is important to ensure you do not choose people with similar skills, as it may result in role conflicts. Therefore, balancing capabilities is important to ensure team collaboration. Managers must ensure team knowledge is evenly distributed and shared to ensure no one team member gains sole expertise on specific processes or tasks.

4. Active Listening

During conflicts, it is crucial for managers to remain unbiased. They must listen to all parties and be empathetic to their feelings. Moreover, being attentive to non-verbal cues is important to ensure managers can effectively resolve conflicts. It is recommended that managers are attentive to commonalities in goals, interests, and strategies and misalignments that may be useful to resolve conflicts, ensuring everyone’s interests are served.

5. Offer a Cooling Period

While ensuring conflicts do not arise by anticipating possible situations is ideal, it is not always achievable. Therefore, it is important to ensure managers do not address conflicts when the situation is escalated in the heat of the moment. They must offer a cooling period where team members can reflect on the situation. Later, the conflicting team members and their managers may get into a discussion to evaluate the situation and reach a mutually beneficial resolution.

6. Keep the Final Goal in Mind

Often, conflicts in a workplace arise because team members may have varying ideas on how to achieve common goals or complete tasks. Managers must address the situation by keeping in mind the overall organizational goals, mission, and values. These should guide interactions and offer a clear path forward to resolve conflicts.

When team members do not collaborate, it results in problems and wasted time. However, it may be difficult to ensure everyone works well together at all times. More than 80% of team members claim that a lack of collaboration or ineffective communication results in workplace failures.Leadership training programs for first-time managers from PLI help organizations develop a collaborative and effective team for organizational success. Check out our programs here.