Team Dynamics: Key for a Better Chemistry for your team

6 min readJun 5, 2021

What are team dynamics?

Team dynamics are processes and behaviors transpiring among team members that influence both team performance and overall productivity. It can be explained as the life, personality, and synergies of any team. Team dynamics also impacted by company culture and structure and the upper management’s leadership style, but the strongest influences come from within the group itself.

There are team dynamics factors that affect the direction of a team’s performance. The dynamics are created by the people involved and how they interact with one another on all levels, including:

Verbal and nonverbal exchanges
Written correspondence
Performance on shared tasks

How to improve team dynamics?

A team that works together can create a good and great work environment. Here are the keys that can improve team dynamics in the workplace such:

Conduct a diagnosis and get to know your team

Conduct a diagnosis of what is going wrong in your team by doing a team health check. Observe your team at work and conduct individual interviews in a private, safe, and confidential space. Talk to other relevant people, such as customers and line managers, to find out as much as you can about your team’s problems.

Address problems quickly

When facing other people that engaging in unhelpful behavior, work to address it quickly. Speak to the team member directly and invite him or her to reflect on the behavior and how it can be changed to support the team’s goals. Finding resolution of that problem can help to improve your team dynamics.

Create a team charter

Teams and individual team members need a strong focus to thrive. If you create a team charter and offer clearly defined roles, you could motivate team members to address their responsibilities and work together more effectively.

Enhance team culture

The purpose of this is to create a workplace that supports employee well-being, success, and enthusiasm for work. Value diversity and think about how you can build trust and respect among team members. Support open communication, sharing of ideas through an inclusive work culture.

Build communication

Building good communication and encourage team members to communicate clearly with each other is one of the purposes of team dynamics. Keep team members updated about project changes and news, and they will feel included and alerted to what is going on. Make sure both opinionated and quieter team members feel their voices are heard.

Always pay attention

As a team member, you should always be paying attention to your team and know what is going on. Look out for unacceptable behaviors such as bullying, groupthink, and freeriding so you are ready to address them right away. Reinforce positive behaviors like successful collaboration, sharing of ideas, trust, and respect.

Servant Leader

Servant leadership is a style based on the desire to serve and give to your community. The characteristic of this style is by putting the needs of others first, you empower people to perform at their best. When members of the community see your passion and your commitment through your actions, they want to be connected to you.

Robert Greenleaf created the theory of servant leadership in 1970 at the age of 66. At the time, he was working at AT&T, where he had risen from lineman into organizational management.

There are 10 characteristics or principles of servant leadership. These principles are essential for servant leaders to develop in order to empower those they serve. The example of characteristics are :

Listening

This principle is the most important for implementing servant leadership. Servant leaders are must focused to develop their communication skills by actually listening and communicating with another person, so you’re able to process what was said and then apply it to the situation.

Empathy

This principle is about building trust and letting other people know that you care about them and you're equal to them. To implement empathy to your member can be done by telling to them “we’re are in this together” as High school musical movies say.

Awareness

This principle is about caring about what’s happening around you and with your team. One point to remember that you must also aware of yourself to be a good servant leader. Understanding yourself includes knowledge about who you are and your values.

Persuasion

Effective servant leaders build group consensus through “gentle” but clear and persistent persuasion and do not impose group compliance through positional power. Servant leaders use persuasion to build consensus and gain support from their team. That way everyone feels they have a stake in the team’s success.

Commitment to the growth of others

Servant leaders focus on this at least as often as other leadership models because they are focused on building others up. True leadership isn’t about being in charge all the time but also delegating to other people. Another characteristic of this principle is to not only succeed by yourself but moving towards the greater good together. The goal is to learn how to be a leader, live those characteristics, and then teach others how to become the leader.

Implementation of Team Dynamics by Team Slogan

Team slogan is one way to implement team dynamics to improve the spirit of the organization based on the mission that is held by the organization. Team slogans are usually meaningful and catchy at the same time. Usually, it refers to the explanation of what the organization stands for and if motivated, will do their best to live up to the slogan. An example of the slogan is a famous brand such as Nike with the iconic slogan “Just Do It!” that can be interpreted as a motivation to don't afraid to start your act for your dreams.

To make your team slogan you can look into your organizational purpose and mission and find the statement that describes the most statement of the organization. Don’t forget to make with short, catchy, and easy to memorize. Lastly, you must formulate the slogan with the key individuals in your team. By taking everyone’s opinion and finding agreement will produce a greater sense of responsibility for the organizational mission. It will also make everyone more motivated to find ways to fulfill and live out the slogan of the organization.

The team slogan can motivate and improve the spirit of our team to achieve our mission. In our PPL project, we don’t yet have a team slogan for our development project, but every each of our members will support each other until the end.

Implementation of Team Dynamics by Team Building

One way to implement team dynamics in our PPL team is by doing team building. The purpose of team building is to improve the chemistry between members of a team to maximize dynamics in a team. The result of this activity is to know more about your team member and understand their personality, so it can help you when development processes are being in progress. Team building can be done online or directly. But because of this pandemic, implementation of our team is being done online.

Disclaimer :

This is my article for my Individual Review for PPL course at the Faculty of Computer Science, University of Indonesia.

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