What are the ways to enhance the teamwork of your staff? They can raise the effectiveness of your team if everyone is attuned to individual roles, has a trained back-up, and is focused and motivated.

So how do you focus and motivate a group of individuals to operate as a team?

Consider these 8 suggestions:

· Improve your listening skills … to better understand the perspectives of all team members

· Create trust … your team must have faith in team goals and what you ask them to do. Be honest at all times

· Openly share information and be able to be influenced

· Be able to disagree … and then reconcile the conflict

· Learn and respond … to important discoveries

· Support risk-taking and change … it is ok to fail

· Celebrate even the small collaborative wins

· Create an environment where it is OK to ask for help

The bottom line

In General Stanley McChrystal’s efforts to transform the Special Forces in Iraq, he ran into challenges trying to get diverse teams to work together. Yet he saw that by building connections between units he could build a “team of teams” that was able to effectively coordinate action. In One Mission, his aide-de-camp, Chris Fussell, describes two strategies used to achieve this effect.

The first was to leverage high-performing liaison officers to build personal connections among disparate units. The second, called the “O&I” forum, was a daily video conference that was designed to create informal connections between officers at an “operational cadence.” Since leaving the military, McChrystal and Fussell have had similar success implementing these strategies in civilian organizations at their consulting group.