What do you particularly recognise when thinking about improving collaboration?

What do you particularly recognise when thinking about improving collaboration?

Team4Teams specialises in supporting cooperation in and between teams, in management and in a board, horizontally and vertically: With our experienced team coaches, you strengthen a healthy working atmosphere. We support and inspire:

  • executive teams,
  • support teams,
  • self-organising (self-managing) teams,
  • leadership teams,
  • project teams (e.g. a construction team in which organisations work together)
  • management teams,
  • management teams.

For our guidance, it does not matter what an organisation and team do in terms of content. Our focus is: how can a team be collaborative, within the team itself and with other teams. Supporting an organisation as a whole gives more lasting effect compared to supporting a single team. Both make sense. This is how an organisation stays healthy.

Modern organisations have become complex.
Paying attention to improving collaboration in teams makes all the difference.

Discover more (with the green dots to the right of this) about collaborating, eluding and surviving teams and which programme supports their development.

Why focus on collaboration?

Improving cooperation requires good contact

Why focus on improving collaboration?

On content, procedure and cooperation

An organisation works from goals, focused on results. Content we call it, it is about something, there is an overarching goal. It is the answer to the question: Why are we working together?

In addition, there are procedures needed to achieve goals. How do we work together? Once established, employees follow these procedures - if there are not too many and they are 'carried'. Procedures are sometimes imposed, e.g. (an additional) reporting. 

The cooperation besides content and procedure, is the third aspect that requires attention. In good cooperation, questions about 'why', 'how' and 'what' reinforce each other. Goals are adjusted more smoothly, procedures more quickly adapted and followed with commitment.

In modern organisations, colleagues are increasingly dependent on each other. Improving and maintaining cooperation has become important. It provides necessary resilience.

Increasing performance while making fewer errors is only possible if there are also structural attention is paid to cooperation. This starts from a work meeting where cooperation is on the agenda to team support, to strengthen and accelerate a cooperation.
Practice makes perfect.

Resilient cooperation

Any successful team will cite a focus on improving collaboration as a key success factor. The team has developed resilience. Attention to collaboration yields understanding, alignment, faster working and fewer mistakes. It GIVES energy. Content (results) and processes (procedures) have been balanced by attention to cooperation in and between teams. Focusing only on content and procedures leads to unnecessary bureaucracy, too much criticism, denial and abdication. The people who have to do the work are not seen enough. That COST energy and resilience gets damaged. Resilience is not a question of 'it is either there or it is not', but of development. Resilience is enhanced once collaboration itself is on the agenda.

team training in giving and receiving feedback

Improving collaboration in and between teams

Do procedures only add and never leave? Look at the collaboration!

Is a team losing resilience? Look at cooperation.

Is a colleague (manager) coming under pressure 'because they are not performing'? Then also look (first) at cooperation! In a well-cooperating team, differences are deployed and colleagues complement each other.

Does tension arise between the board and management, or between management and teams? Then also ask yourself: 'what about collaboration!'

It is an area of focus that delivers a lot, but where there is also embarrassment. Improving collaboration deserves attention. And gives teams resilience.

It is good relations that are decisive for results

Attention to collaboration is the key to any successful business. This applies to every sector of IT, healthcare (medical), education, service providers, government agencies, construction and manufacturing.

We are a close-knit team' is the first thing a successful team reports about their success. Anyone who has ever been part of a successful team sees through the impact and depth of this comment. There is connection and a clear purpose.

They are teams who do their homework: who address each other in a timely and positive manner and pick up improvements together.

team training
Improving collaboration inside a factory hall

Teachers lead a learning process in the classroom. But how to do that in a core team when more people want to take the lead or colleagues continue to go their own way anyway?

An IT person knows that a certain feature in an application is not a good fit, but does someone in sales say the same if the customer necessarily wants it?

A doctor wants the best care for the patient. But when pressure comes from a health insurer and budgets get strained, what or who gets the bill?

How is paying attention to collaboration going to make a difference in this?

Improving cooperation

Learning to understand each other better makes a difference.

Good cooperation has the right mix between content, procedures and collaboration.

Attention to relationships between team members improves communication, energises teams, reduces absenteeism, prevents work-related burnout and premature departure.

From a successful team, nobody wants to leave.

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Improving cooperation

with teams under pressure and with teams in dire straits

On course with a mission

The Scale of Collaboration

Scale of Collaboration

The Scale of Collaboration provides insight and an overview of where a team stands in its cooperation. In this way, the Scale provides tools that a team itself can use to reach a higher level of cooperation.  

Survival

A team can fall on hard times, it then becomes 'survival' for everyone. Survival has a price, but it is also a right. Going into battle creates resistance and annoyance, but may also be necessary out of injustice. Team members experience powerlessness. Appreciation for what does go well is lacking. Too often, 'on the man' played. Someone 'must' be guilty. Fear and an insecure culture lurk. Trusting each other gets lost.

There is a growing desire to move to a collaborative situation in one step. But this lacks a shared positive language, flexibility and creativity. And leadership from within the team, wanting to take a first step, daring to be vulnerable, taking unexpected positive paths in unexpected circumstances, taking the team along in a change. Not only leadership from the formal manager, from the vertical line, but also responsibility and horizontal self-organisation from the team are needed. With (these) intermediate steps manage to flourish and work together again. A team can go into 'survival mode' with one comment. Collaboration is a step-by-step process, so a team is not out of it in one step. It does start with simultaneously wanting to take a first step.

Dodge

If you want to get away from a survivor situation, we advise you to first stop fuelling conflict and pointing at each other. Count to ten and distance yourself. This gives peace, but also creates distance, we call this Escaping. Sometimes that seems like an impassable road, namely, what will you solve by doing that? The problem, the cause is still there in life. That's right. With the difference that now we can talk about the problem without getting personal. The team members engage in conversation, where sometimes even the contradictions have to be put on the table first.

Employing a team coach acts as a catalyst to achieve motivated results in cooperation. What is actually the problem and what is 'fuelling' it? It is not the person himself, but what the person does (or fails to do) that comes to the table. We find shortcomings and perceived lack (of attention and appreciation, for example).

The other way round is also possible: there was good cooperation and the motivation to do so is increasingly lacking. People avoid what was agreed. Again, the problem, which leads to a lack of motivation, has to be put on the table first, while everyone keeps circling it. Here, too, team coaching helps enormously.

Collaborate

In a collaborative group, there is spontaneous appreciation for what the other does and recognition for what the other needs. What gets attention grows. Mistakes made are put on the table and dealt with together. The mistake and who should be held accountable for it are no longer the focus, the mistake (the task itself) becomes the focus and attention turns to how it can be dealt with in the next situation. Only then does it become apparent that many could have done something. Team members make agreements on who does what, focusing on what could be done better. One plays 'on the task'. An open mind makes flexible and creativity flourishes. Everyone can contribute.

Giving and receiving recognition, being reliable, doing your thing and giving and receiving appreciation are the keys to developing a top team.

But now, what if you experience that it is not yet Collaborative? Even then, a collaborative attitude is important. What can already be done? Who is participating? What first step re-energises? Are you yourself under fire and is your initiative not appreciated? Then enlist outside help.

Where does your team stand on the Scale?

Survival

The pressure is too high.

People experience deficits and lack.

Dodge

Improvement is slow.

Good will is lost in consultation.

Collaborate

Feedback gives returns.

Agendas are aligned.

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What can you do?

Survival

Bridging contradictions

Is confidence under pressure?

Do you want to overcome contradictions and put a period of conflict behind you? Then ask for team coaching. A warring team experiences that alignment no longer works, outside help is needed to break the stalemate. Annoyance destroys more than it can heal again. A team coach aims to teach a team to turn problems into opportunities themselves. 

A switch from thinking in difficulties to thinking in possibilities first requires distance from the conflict. Sometimes it is necessary to put 'everything' on the table first; with a few ground rules, this works. This gives air. The team then searches for a higher common goal and explores where team members can find positive energy. This process requires space and time. The result is a new perspective. No one expected that yet.

The trigger was annoyance. In the middle phase, that annoyance is no longer there, but the positive 'drive' to be motivated together does not come naturally. This is the most exciting moment in the process of team coaching (also for us). Is this team taking a step towards becoming a self-learning team, by addressing each other and providing learning coaching?

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Increasing efficiency (of consultations)

Are there any motivation issues?

Talking about and talking to can both be positive and lead to advice. However, if a team is in a stalemate - the team members do talk about a dilemma for a long time, but no one is tying the knot and progress is lacking, it does something to motivation. 

A team trainer supports team members to become honest with each other in addition to being kind. Those who are honest in contact with the other become vulnerable. You can only afford that in a situation that is collaborative and where, by being bold, you increase mutual trust and the resulting cooperation. The theme here is: how can you grow from a disengaged culture, lacking motivation, to a collaborative culture that energises everyone?

Scoring under pressure

Feedback light and airy -learning- asking and giving

Addressing each other in a learning way is natural in your team. Yet sometimes the team falls back into old behaviour. Then feedback training is great. The training reinforces what is already going well. The team does its own securing in the following weeks in the workplace. With the Borgbox, key persons receive support. Team growth thus proceeds step by step.

Periodic maintenance of cooperation helps to accelerate a team's growth. Every top team has a lot of practice behind it and continues to train. This is true not only in sports. Well-cooperating teams know that. With this training, your team will learn to score under pressure.

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