Teams are a crucial part of organisational life, success and engagement. They can be productive, fun, rewarding and give members that all important sense of belonging and community. But when things go wrong, teams can be awful - very distressing for members, very time consuming for leaders and a drain on organisational resources and development. Our work with teams helps them to understand what is happening to them and develop their robustness and resilience, so that they can manage their teamwork far more effectively and have the tools to be high performing, enjoyable and creative.
Our expertise in the psychological aspect of teamwork means that we know how normal it is for teams to go awry at times, and what to do about it. We know that under stress teams will often become unproductive and can easily get into conflict – with each other, their leader, other teams. There are actually some key pointers about what is going on unconsciously in teams that we help them to become aware of. Once you’ve got this understanding, it’s so much easier to stop the negative behaviour or get out of it quickly.
We also know about the impact on teams of the complexity of working relationships within them, and the unspoken things that are always present in some way. For instance, the natural fear we can have - it may not be conscious - about being excluded from a team; how competitive we can feel towards our peers. And the ordinary difficulties we can have with other people being different – perhaps a different race, religion or culture, but also just having different opinions or working styles. We use our psychological expertise to help teams to develop their capacity to understand and work with these dynamics, so that the impact becomes constructive rather than destructive, and they are equipped to go forward positively.
