How to get your teams and business more effective

Hot on the heels of my last short blog on personal effectiveness, I got some inquiries on whether Shiageto had any tips for how to improve the effectiveness of teams and companies.

Without further ado, here we go with 6 top tips:

1. Create more shared experiences - the more a team/business have shared experiences, the more they know each other and the easier it is to be collaborative. This could be shared projects, shared meetings, shared social events. Nothing starts the breakdown of barriers like a shared experience. If you want some ideas have a read here about lightning rods and speed bumps
2. Create more psychological safety - when individuals feel psychologically safer, they are more likely to bring their best self to work. Long term this means creating a culture where it's ok to disagree with others or fail, short term it means helping people getting on better with those around them to be more effective. A great quickfire way to do this is using 'get-to-know-you' sessions to accelerate teaming through the forming-storming-norming-performing curve
3. Create a culture of recognition - hand-in-hand with a psychologically safe business is one where people get good feedback and praise. Putting in place a culture of regular, consistent and honest feedback is the dream but short term you could do worse off then just showing more gratitude. You can do this through awards, public endorsements or just good old compliments (I'll be doing a blog on that at some point soon)
4. Make clear your vision and strategy - never assume everyone 'gets it'. You can never do enough to keep talking about what your are aiming for and to set it out in a clear, unambiguous way so that your business can just get on with doing it rather than trying to decipher it. Read here a little more about why removing confusion can improve effectiveness
5. Set out priorities - similar in a way to removing confusion, your business is probably trying to do too much already and individuals are having to make their own decisions on what they should be focusing on. If you can help them with that then you'll unleash some additional effectiveness. Read here on a useful approach to how you can determine what the priorities of your business should be
6. Remove barriers in their way - every additional thing in our way makes going from A to B a little harder. This can be small things like having a slow laptop or never being able to find a meeting room or it can be big things like unconscious bias holding back minorities. If you want to unleash effectiveness in your business, regularly do a quick audit of the all the barriers (big or small) facing your people and fix them

What do you think? Do these make sense? Anything to add? Is this an effective effectiveness list?