Once a man expressed the power of teamwork as “If you could get all the people in the organization heading in the same direction;
Then, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.” Everyone finds it completely true!
But the reality is, recall when you say anything to your team regarding teamwork, partnership, and unity.
They immediately nod their heads, they seem to catch the truth but at the same time, they seem surrendering to the impossibility of making it true.
This is an example of a Dysfunction.
Dysfunctions of a team directly affect the companies’ performance. It influences and declines their productivity, also leads to dissatisfaction and deterioration.
Although, every company and organization face conflicts but there is major difference between functional and dysfunctional conflicts.
Functional conflicts are non-aggressive form of conflict which allows ideas to flow as a spontaneous creativity.
In this case, people may disagree with each other but still try their best to find a way to get out of the problem.
Dysfunctional conflict is an aggressive form of conflict, where people refuse to work together towards a particular problem because of their egocentric behaviour.
Therefore, the project work takes more time to get complete, and become compromised.
Sometimes this dysfunctional conflict shows some major disadvantages like inappropriate behaviour, include violence at working place.
These behaviours directly affect the growth of company or business.
We are fortunate that the cause of dysfunction is both identifiable and curable.
Making a team functional, productive, and coordinated requires levels of courage, discipline, and patience that many people lack.
Let’s go through each and every dysfunction of a team together and get some amazing ways to solve it.
Also, you must be aware that the first step towards reducing diplomacy and confusion within a team is to understand that there are major 5 dysfunctions to deal with.
You must address each problem one by one.
1. Absence of Trust
This happens when team members are unwilling to admit their mistakes, and weaknesses. They hold grudges towards other members.
Even, they lack certain level of comfort zone in the team, so they face dread meetings.
They avoid spending time together. Also, they hesitate a lot to share their perspective with seniors and other team members.
Therefore, in this dysfunction building trust between team members becomes tough.
2. Fear of Conflict
Absence of trust builds fear of conflict.
How?
Teams that have trust issues are incapable of engaging in passionate debates and discussions about major issues.
These situations mainly turn team conflicts into bad violence.
Employees of these companies do not openly talk about their opinions, so they are more likely to have inferior decisions as a result.
3. Lack of Commitment
Lack of commitment creates an environment where ambiguity persists.
In fact, Lack of direction, commitment and unity can make employees annoyed. When team members become problem avoiders, a fear of failure develops.
Hence, team faces lots of difficulty in decision making.
4. Avoidance of Accountability
When team do not commit to a clear plan of action, or even the focused individual hesitates to call their peers on action, these behaviours may seem as counterproductive to the overall betterment of the team.
A lack of common objective leads to inability to develop standards of performance. They miss deadlines irresponsibly and deliver average work.
5. Inattention to Results
It’s very important for a team to focus on common result but what if they don’t do this?
Team members tend to put their own needs ahead of the goals of the entire team.
For example – Ego, personal career development, recognition etc.
If a team has forgotten the need of achievement, then ultimately business will suffer. Also, lack of clarity and focus lead to inattention to results.
How to improve this? To begin the improvement of your team you should ask few questions to yourself.
- Do your team members openly talk to you?
- Do your team members disclose their opinions frankly?
- Are your team meetings productive?
- Does your team take decisions quickly, do they avoid confusions, or they stay in perplexity for long?
- Do your team members sacrifice their self-interest for the betterment of the team?
If your answer is “no” to many of the above questions.
Here in this article, you will get the best possible way to sort all the dysfunction of your team and stand out.
Although, no team is perfect, everyone faces issues and struggles with one or more of the above.
But, the finest organisation constantly works to ensure that their answer is “yes” to many of the above questions.
After reading this article make sure you also convert your “no” to “yes”.
How to Overcome All The 5 Dysfunctions of A Team?
Let’s overcome it together.
Read all the given point below attentively and apply it with your team members to check the dysfunction and to overcome it effortlessly.
How to Overcome Absence of Trust
You can solve this dysfunction by helping them to focus on their strength, rather than on their weaknesses in themselves or in others.
The perfect way to know someone’s strength and weakness is to look at the team report.
Acknowledge someone’s strength and talent and appreciating it helps them grow faster.
Like, you can discuss someone’s strength in front of all the team members to appreciate his/her skill.
This will make them feel more motivated to serve their best and to receive this kind of appreciation again later.
Also, Team members will start feeling free to explore in the team, they will start talking to each other about how they achieved this.
This will build good relation among team members.
How to Overcome Fear of Conflict
So here, you need to play a trick with your team members to confirm that this dysfunction exists in your team or not.
During a team meeting suggest a bad idea or a flop plan with your colleagues and team members.
If they accept it without any hesitations or discussion and they agreed with you.
Then, sorry to say you have this dysfunction in your team, and you need to improve it quickly.
Best way to solve this dysfunction is to keep a loud voice, advocate personality person there in the meeting.
Let that one person find faults and give suggestions during the meeting in his way.
This small step will give you best result surely.
His voice will encourage other participants present in the meeting to give their suggestions and views on the topic.
Now you should write all the pros and cons at one place to view the result given by your team members at once.
Also, to see their pursuit of achieving targets.
How to Overcome Lack of Commitment
I have described below few numbers of ways to solve this dysfunction.
Firstly, make a rule to summarise every bit of detail of what everyone says during the team meeting.
You must have decided everything before the meeting starts, that if the meeting is with the team members, then what are the points you have to pick, discuss and get results.
Whereas if the meeting is with someone who is out of that department, then what are the points to avoid.
Second possible way to overcome this dysfunction is to provide everyone with clear deadlines.
Also keep yourself open to every member so they can ask whenever they stuck, doubt or have problems.
This way, team members will take responsibility of their work and will arrive with best possible decisions and results.
How to Overcome Avoidance of Accountability
To resolve this dysfunction, the team members need to successfully overcome the fear of conflict.
Once it is achieved you will be free from this dysfunction.
But how to do it?
Here is the solution, announce to your team members that every individual who will hold high standards of performance and excel in other accountable and responsibilities will be appreciated and rewarded.
This way they will stay away from time wasting conflicts and politics. Also, they will give their best to provide the result.
How to Overcome Inattention to Results
It is important to have a clear metrics to get results. It is good if a team knows how to keep each other accountable;
They will motivate each other towards the common goal not the individual’s goal.
As we talked about appreciating and rewarding team members in the case of avoidance of accountability, in this case rewards and appreciations should be for whole team.
This will encourage team members to maintain good relationships among themselves to get the rewards, and you will get the best result in lesser time.
Always, make sure that individual’s strength, zeal properly aligns with the team’s common goal.
Conclusion
To create functional and cohesive team is one of the main challenges faced by organizations.
But, once they created a team of like-minded and progressive people, they get the advantages like increase in their potential, boost productivity and better outcomes from their company or organisation.
Functional teams fully concentrate on their work, produce high quality decisions, and achieve more in less time because of fewer distractions.
Members of productive team overcome their natural impulses by accepting their flaws and improving it.
Successful teamwork is not about mastering subtle and complex theories. Productive team avoids time wasting on irrelevant topics.
Team members must have discipline and perseverance towards their work.
Hope this article helps you to build a functional team, which later helps you to create path to success.
