These are a few of the common challenges a team may face:
- Role Uncertainty - when working as a team the responsibilities are shared between the team members and sometimes it can be difficult to delegate roles and understand what your role entails within the group dynamics. Clearly setting out individual roles and tasks can help overcome this challenge. Unclear goals can equally cause role uncertainty; therefore, setting clear goals from the start is a key component to ensuring each member of the team understands their roles.
- Lack of Trust - individual work requires you to make decisions and complete tasks by yourself, meaning you trust and rely on yourself to get the work done. When working in a team, having to trust fellow team members to make decisions and complete tasks can be challenging but it is important to build trust in order to function effectively as a team.
- Disengagement - when there's a lack of proper direction or vision to the project at hand, team members can start to disengage from the work and lack in motivation. By clarifying the team goals and how each member can contribute, this can help to maintain motivation.
- Different views, different approaches to the work and different talents and strengths - sometimes talent differences can cause conflicts within a team, depending on talents, some team members may be slower at certain tasks, or less efficient, whereas some may excel in a specific area. It is useful to try and work with the strengths of each individual team member. Set goals or tasks based on each individual's capabilities, skills, and strengths.
- Listening and self-awareness - when team members do not listen to each other and lack self-awareness, which in turn makes individuals resistant to feedback, quick to blame others for their own failures, and quick to take undue credit, this can cause ruptures in how the team works as a group. Reflection can be useful in this regard, so take time to reflect on your own thoughts and perceptions of the group and yourself, and question your position - are you being an active listener? Are you taking feedback onboard? How could you improve this?
- Proximity - when members work in different locations, it can be difficult to set up time for face-to-face meetings. In order to work effectively as a team, communication is a key element and emails/texts valls can sometimes lead to miscommunication. It might be worth committing to weekly or monthly face-to-face meetings if possible, so that members can efficiently and effectively communicate with one another. Periodic in-person meetings help us to connect to other members and can greatly improve the team work progress, since face-to-face exchanges allow members to experience a wider range of communication, such as non-verbal cues, body language and environmental influences that simply cannot come across fully in emails. This can be down through TEAMS or Zoom
