Project Management

The way a team decides to decide is one of the most important decisions it makes.

 
 
Good communication, along with cooperation and trust, are the threads that bind a team into a cohesive unit. Without good communication, cooperation and trust are unlikely to develop. In a cohesive team, communication is clear and positive, and ideas flow freely. Poor communication, on the other hand, leads to misunderstandings, hurt feelings, missed opportunities, and conflict.

Team members need to cooperate to get the job done, whatever that job may be. You can apply three simple strategies to promote cooperation among your team members:

The importance of trust
Trust is the confident reliance in the character, abilities, and actions of others. When you trust someone, you believe she will behave in a certain way based on both your personal feelings about her and the available evidence.
So trust has both an emotional and an intellectual component. Your general feelings about someone, your comfort level with the way he behaves, and your intuition about his character all affect your decision to trust.

Using cohesion-building techniquesCohesive teams are unified, allowing members to work together in productive harmony.

Description

The "Be a STAR" method of building trust divides the necessary trust-building behaviors into four action areas:
Be supportive

Use this job aid as a reminder of the tips and strategies for improving communication, cooperation, and trust when building team cohesion.
Communicating within your team

Developing the meeting outline is to plan the activities that will guide the group to achieving the desired outcomes.

Guided discussions are a type of structured exercise that enable meeting leaders to ask the group a series of planned questions designed to get them to wrestle with topics and issues at a deeper level.