The Devastating effect of Poor Communication on Team Performance

A High Performance team needs a number of characteristics present in order to perform well and achieve superior results.

These include having a common purpose, an understanding of goals, priorities and roles, combined with the need for honesty and trust between team members. All of these factor ensure clarity, cohesiveness and accountability. One of the biggest inhibitors to high performance that we come across today is a failure in communication. This can be due to the fast paced data overloaded environment we live in today. We are bombarded with information and we cannot possibly consume all of it. Trying to decide what’s important and what’s not is a daily challenge. But it can also be down to bad habits and behaviours. Often communication is unclear and meaning misinterpreted. In my experience working with teams, this failure in one of the most fundamental areas of teamwork is a massive contributor to dysfunctional and poorly performing teams.

"The art of communication is the language of Leadership" James Humes

Leading by example

Before trying to influence the team’s behaviour, its essential to acknowledge that the behaviours a leader wants to see in a team must be behaviours and attitudes she adheres to herself. Video speaks louder than audio. A leader must walk the walk to gain the respect and trust of her team. The days of having one rule for management and another for the workers should be long gone. If you want your team to work productively, you must work productively. If you want to see trust, respect and collaboration, these traits should be visible in you. The good news is even if these behaviours don’t come naturally to you they can be learned. Behaviours are habits that we choose to act out daily. When you become aware of your current behaviours, you can consciously create the ones that matter. 40% of what we do each day is habit alone, if we were to reduce that 40% by even 1% and consciously create habits that matter, imagine the impact we could have on our personal performance and the performance of our teams.

Ensuring Clarity

Knowing the Purpose and the goal

Having a common and shared purpose motivates teams to work together. The more compelling the better. When a team is clear about why they exist and what their mission is, they are more likely to work more efficiently each day and in turn get better results.

A high‐performance team is clear about its goals and objectives. You can never be productive if you’re unclear about your goals. Working hard doesn’t achieve anything if you’re working toward the wrong goals. Get clear on the team’s goals. The clearer you are about the end goal, the more productive you can be every day.

Great leaders break down into the goals in to meaningful sub goals that can be measured. Having a big goal in the future can be inspiring but if the roadmap is not drawn in detail, you risk getting lost on route. To maintain motivation and momentum, teams need a shared roadmap, one that is visible and clear. When this roadmap is followed on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, communication and performance will improve. What it also does is ensure that there is accountability and transparency. Loss of motivation in teams can sometimes occur when a team has a non performer who is not held accountable for their actions.

Understanding priorities

Clear goals help you understand your priorities. If you know what you’re trying to achieve and the task you’re doing is getting you closer to achieving it, then it’s more than likely a priority. To make sure you’re staying on task with your priorities, ask yourself regularly during the day whether what you’re working on is getting you closer to your goals.

Identifying roles

Understanding your personal role in a team goes a long way to producing effective results. When people are clear about their role and responsibilities, they waste less time and take more dynamic action. Ambiguity is the killer of progress, it stalls decision making and inhibits growth.

"Ambiguity is the killer of progress " Ciara Conlon

Fostering Trust & Psychological Safety

Trust is an essential component of a high-performance team. Team members need to be confident in each other’s abilities to get things done. They need to be able to trust each other and hold each other accountable for what they say they will do. Without trust a team cannot perform at their best. A second component of this is Psychological safety. Team members need to feel safe to take risk and be vulnerable in front of each other.

How to Improve Team Communications

Collaboration is crucial for an effective team to function, and collaboration doesn’t happen without high levels of effective communication. Communication is essential to not only get things done but get them done well and within a specified time frame. When you have a team that communicates successfully, it functions more efficiently and is more likely to reach its goals.

Team leaders need to create the environment for good communication to take place and encourage staff to use the appropriate channels of communication at the appropriate time. Following are a number of ways in which you can improve team communications and function more effectively.

Curbing email

People rely too much on email, sending emails to everyone in the organisation to ensure that nobody gets left out. But email isn’t always the right choice. Often, a face‐to‐face conversation can be a lot more productive or a short team meeting can avoid pages of email conversations. Teamwork can often be hindered by overreliance on email, encouraging people to spend?too much time answering and forwarding emails rather than getting any actual work done. Teamwork can be a lot more efficient if you use a team tool, such as Asana or Teamwork. These tools give you a place to story all information relevant to the team’s projects and a place to hold all conversation relating to those tasks. 

Conducting More Efficient Meetings

Most meetings have the potential to be great, but too many are far from great. Hours of productivity are lost weekly to inefficient and unnecessary meetings.

When planning a team meeting, be sure your meeting is necessary to start with and then make sure you run it as effectively as possible. A meeting should be as long as you need but as short as possible. Have a think about your regular meetings and determine whether you can circulate updates to the team in a more efficient way. Using a team tool can eliminate the need for status update meetings.

Meeting Face to Face

Meeting face to face is a powerful mode of communication and usually one that gets more effective results than email or other electronic methods. Create a list of questions or tasks for your team in your electronic notepad, then when the time comes to meet face to face, you can ask the questions at once instead of using email.

You could suggest that team members set times they don’t want to be disturbed, to allow time for getting the work done between meetings and other modes of communication.

Listening

Listening is essential for building trust and respect between team members and, of course, a fundamental part of effective communication. If every team member gets the opportunity to speak and be heard, you’ll see higher levels of contribution and engagement.

Remind team members on a regular basis how important listening is. Leaders need to be good listeners, too, and lead by example.

If the team can communicate effectively, they will benefit from some of the advantages of having a communicative team. Following are some of the high- lights when a team communicates well.

Reduce errors

Teams that interact well together and that have positive channels of commu- nication avoid the errors that come from team members being ill‐informed or unclear about their purpose or goals. Younger or newer members of a team are more likely to hide their lack of understanding. Clear and effective interaction with all team members supports more positive results.

Foster input

A team works best when it has a diverse set of skills working together for a common goal. It’s important to encourage input from all team members. Try to avoid the same dominant personalities giving the input and the quieter ones sitting back. Nurturing the relationships between team members can encourage the quieter personalities to give more input. Getting input from all members of the team gives a stronger output.

Reducing stress

Dis-organisation and uncertainty cause stress. Clarity and efficiency reduce it. Investing time in team building and ensuring that effective processes are in place and means of communication are established will go a long way to creating a successful and productive team.

Utilising Team Tools

Team collaboration tools are a great way to move from using email to more efficient management of team tasks and projects. Depending on your industry and your job role, you may have specific tools that you need to use for the processes required. For example, sales professionals use sales software to manage their sales process, and technical support professionals have a support database to manage their customer queries.

If your job role doesn’t require any specific tool for collaboration, you should consider adopting one of the popular team tools to improve team collaboration and communication.

Evernote Spaces

Evernote Spaces is part of Evernote Business with the goal of bringing people, projects and ideas together. With Evernote Business you can create and share notes and files in real time, ensuring that information is not duplicated and your team always has the latest updates.

You can find information faster and stay in sync with all team members where ever they are. Evernote Business also integrates with Slack, Outlook, Drive, Microsoft Teams and Sales force meaning you can use all your favourite tools in unison.

Teamwork

Teamwork projects is a cloud based project management solution for people who want to own the big picture. Its software helps you to focus on the things that matter. It will give you complete visibility over your team’s progress and performance with high level overviews and detailed updates to help manage workloads and keep everyone up to date.

Features include task lists, time tracking, file uploads and messages. Teamwork Projects helps teams manage group objectives, communicate and establish business processes.

Teamwork Projects' project scheduling feature allows project managers to define project tasks, assign them to people and track in-progress assignments. The solution also features document management, which allows users to share documents within the team through an online portal.

Asana

Asana is a collaborating tool for teams, Its tagline – ‘Teamwork without email’ – explains its goal. Asana aims to remove the incessant chatter on email around team tasks. By placing all team tasks in Asana and having all conversations about these tasks in the tool, you can not only rapidly and massively reduce the amount of time you spend in your email inbox but also improve your productivity.

Asana was founded by ex‐Facebook employees who developed it to solve the problem of email overload in Facebook. They then went on to create a company out of it. Their mission is to ‘Help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly’. Part of a new generation of organisations that not only want to be profitable but also want to make a difference.

Trello

Trello also promotes the fact that it will reduce your email conversations and the need to use spreadsheets to manage projects.

Trello is based on a Kanban approach. A Kanban approach stems from the Toyota production method where visual cards on a physical board were used to signal steps in the manufacturing process. Columns on the board are known as swim lanes, representing different stages in your process. These swim lanes could represent simple steps like ready, doing, done.

For those of you who like visual tools, Trello is a good option because it helps you to visualize your team’s progress in any task as you watch it progress on the Kanban board.

Getting team buy‐in

Any of these team tools will help to improve team communications and enhance productivity and effectiveness. The biggest barrier to making these tools work is the commitment required. If the team doesn’t buy into using the tool 100 per cent, the tool will eventually fail. Spending time choosing what you think may be the right tool is essential, but getting buy‐in in advance is also important. Sell the benefits, and let the team members see how much easier their jobs and lives will be if they start to use it. Get a internal influencer to become an advocates. If team members see that the team leader and other key individuals are using the tool and liking it, you’ll be a lot closer to getting buy‐in and commitment from the whole team.

Ciara Conlon is a High Performance Leadership Coach, Productivity Mentor, Speaker and Author. Ciara is co founder of Spirit Leadership a consultancy working with leaders and teams to elevate Performance, Productivity and Well-being.

Ciara has recently published her third book Rise Before Your Bull and Other Habits of Successful People

https://www.ciaraconlon.com