For a Team to Work Smoothly, You Need 3 Things

February 25, 2019

For a Team to Work Smoothly, You Need 3 Things

If your colleagues aren’t working well together, there are a few ways to change the team dynamic. Everyone — including you — should consider how they can improve three things: internal self-awareness, external self-awareness, and personal accountability.

Internal self-awareness is about understanding how your values affect your decisions. To improve, consider how your emotions and assumptions in a situation lead you to act a certain way. Resist the urge to act until you understand what’s driving you.
External self-awareness is about understanding how your actions affect other people. To improve, pay attention to how your colleagues react to things, and ask yourself (or them) what could be behind their behavior.
Personal accountability helps you asses how you are contributing to a problem. To improve, accept that you probably share some blame for what’s going wrong. Use internal and external self-awareness to think carefully about how you may need to change.
Adapted from “To Improve Your Team, First Work on Yourself," by Jennifer Porter