Examine how leaders can reenergize and refocus a fatigued team through support, empathy, and effective influence. It also defines the distinctions between collaboration, teamwork, and collaborative teamwork, encouraging reflection on how these dynamics support project success.
Key Insights
- Effective leaders reinvigorate teams by meeting individually with members, offering support, and reinforcing belief in the group’s ability to reach its goals.
- Collaboration involves individuals with different skill sets working together to produce a collective outcome, such as a shared project or task.
- Collaborative teamwork combines both individual expertise and cooperative processes, allowing team members to maximize strengths and support one another toward a unified objective.
This lesson is a preview from our Leading Through Relationship-Building Course Online & Emerging Leader Certificate Program. Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Welcome back. So, as you looked at your tired team, you probably realized that, wow, those influencing strategies in our talk are probably important. So, what are some of the things that you listed? Well, you probably said I have to encourage questions and discussions about what's going right, what's going wrong.
Show them support. Remind them that you've accomplished this so far. Be clear that the goal is in sight and we can do it.
I probably want to meet one-on-one with your members and see what's really happening with each of them, how they're feeling, how they're thinking, where their energy level is, what they need from you, and provide feedback to the team. But being that emotional energizer and supportive leader is probably really critical here. Obstacles, you may get some resistance, and that resistance, I think, is realistic.
But it doesn't mean that you're failing. It means that they're being open and honest about how they see the situation. But again, if they can feel your empathy for them, if they can see that you still believe in them and that the project is still really important, chances are very possible that you can get this team back on track because you are an influencer.
So now we get to this place of collaboration. Your team can collaborate. And I think we need to have some definitions here.
And collaboration is the action of working with one or more people, and these are people who have different skill sets, to produce something. And that might be a project, a shared idea, or completing a task. But we are saying collectively that these people with different skill sets need to produce something, a collective work product.
Teamwork. Well, teamwork talks about the qualities and the abilities, and processes of working well with one or more people to accomplish a common goal. So we figure out how to use our individual skill sets to be able to accomplish that goal together.
Collaborative teamwork. When we put the two together, what does that mean? It means members have distinct skill sets and can produce work together. So we figure out how to maximize our strengths as a team, minimize our weaknesses, and be able to be highly performing as a team.
We can produce together that we can create that collective work product. So what I'd like you to think about here is, as we are looking at closing out this module, think of collaborative teamwork in regard to a recent project or a work task that you've had to do with other people. I want you to describe the project or the goal.
And then, if you can, what is one, at least one example of collaboration that occurred within your group? So were you sharing ideas, for example, or sharing different ideas of what the problem is or the biggest obstacle to overcome as you do the task? Or maybe it had been about problem-solving. Also, provide an example of teamwork, and hopefully, you do have one. So, teamwork is about defining our own roles? Were we setting norms of behavior for one another? Did we support our teammates? Maybe I got my part finished early, but I could turn around and help someone else with theirs.
That we would share responsibilities, that we shared leadership within the group. And then was there collaborative teamwork in which the individual skill sets of those people in your group, in your team, were utilized? And contributed to the ultimate work project as you worked together throughout the time of the project. So take a few moments and really consider what that project was, and did it have collaboration? Did it have teamwork? Did it have collaborative teamwork?
