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12 Key Elements Leadership Can Put In Place To Enable A Cohesive, High-Performing Team

Forbes Human Resources Council

Leadership roles can require putting certain elements and steps in place to adopt a team that works as an efficient, connected team. These steps may include creating special exercises to better understand how your team works and having an open-door policy for everyone on the team.

Some leaders may have a difficult time coming up with ideas that can get them to this point. Below, 12 Forbes Human Resources Council members share an element that can be a resolution to get your team there.

1. Encouragement

Leaders who encourage their team with synergy and team spirit and motivate knowledge exchange at different levels can guarantee outstanding outcomes. Assuming one has a diverse and multicultural team working under the same goal. It is important to create a culture where individuals can contribute their best talents to achieve results together. - Evgenia Pavlova, ECM Space Consulting

2. Equality

What corporate leaders forget is that culture is fluid and often changes over time. Every action a company takes has the ability to affect not just one specific person but everyone else at the organization. How a company treats its employees during times of fluidity impacts the cohesion of its culture in huge ways. - Gianna Driver, Exabeam

3. Influence

One word that defines leadership is influence. Influence can be created by many actions but the simple and easy to understand will be through transparent communication. Teams gel and work together when they feel they work in a secure environment. A Secure environment is formed through transparent and open communication creating trust that acts as the basis of building high-performing teams. - Prakash Raichur, Taghleef Industries

4. Relationship-Building Skills

Cohesion on a team necessarily requires relationship building. In our increasingly distributed workforce environment, leaders must be intentional in facilitating introductions for new team members, promoting high-touch collaborations between team members and carving out social time. Building a culture like this is like riding a bicycle—it takes energy to get up to speed but then you're rolling! - Jennie Walker, DeEtta Jones & Associates


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5. Transparency

Transparency is essential to creating high-performing teams. When leaders are transparent, this creates a cultural shift that trickles down to all employees across an organization. Whether the transparency is regarding performance standards, business goals, objectives or changes to come, transparency and clear communication ease employee angst and results in all operating as a cohesive unit. - JacLyn Pagnotta, Allied Partners

6. Team-Building Activities

My teams have benefitted from learning about themselves and one another via workstyle self-assessment tools. These help us understand how we can best communicate and work together based on unique preferences and styles of working. I encourage leaders to include workshops like this at their next gathering as a valuable team-building activity and as a means of more effective communication. - Eva Majercsik, Genesys

7. Company Meetings

Establish weekly or biweekly all-hands meetings where the CEO chats with all employees via Zoom and provides a business update, showing employees charts that track the key company KPIs and updating them on new plans and strategies. Make the meetings fun, gather input from various teams, welcome new hires and recognize key contributions. Give employees insight into how the business is doing. - Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter

8. Sharing Feedback

Create an environment of psychological safety. Only when employees feel safe will they be vulnerable to speaking up with ideas and feedback. To create a safe work environment, identify guiding principles or values that every employee must demonstrate. Build authentic relationships with your staff, express care for your employees as people, and reframe failure as an opportunity to learn. - Lisa Shuster, iHire

9. Respectful Discussions

For a team to perform at a high level, everyone should feel free to express their opinions in a respectful way and engage in thoughtful discussion. Everyone needs to feel that they are "in the loop." Most of all, team members need to feel seen, heard and that their input is given fair consideration. - Carrie Trabue, Carrington Legal Search

10. Listening

A DEI strategy that prioritizes two simple steps: listening and acting. Find ways to solicit input from your employees about how they do and don’t feel supported at work and what will make them feel more successful, then start to come up with programs or actions that effectively respond to those needs. - Ursula Mead, InHerSight

11. Reviews

Three-hundred and sixty degree reviews are amazing ways to spark cohesiveness and build an equally balanced high-performance team. It helps to improve employee relationships, promotes self-accountability and outlines clear pathways to improve overall performance. This, in turn, improves employee engagement, reflects higher productivity and solidifies retention within the organization. - Tiersa Smith-Hall, The Hartling Group

12. Humility

Meaningless buzz words crowd the internet, and people are overwhelmed with information. A leader that is truthful, transparent, humble and genuinely team-orientated will develop a cohesive and high-performing team as a result of simply being authentic. The self-serving conflict, addictive leader is simply no longer relevant. - Patricia Sharkey, IMI A Global People Company

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