Connectivity is the ability and want to connect to other teams. It acts like a bridge which facilitates collaboration and helps share thoughts to the wider company to achieve common goals. Being able to reach out across silos, to work together, allows for the efficient flow of information and resources so a company can better react to opportunities and challenges.
Having these kind of connections is important for both strong relationships within a team as well as reaching out beyond it. A high performing team will be able to leverage those strong bonds to take leaps forward to generate new ideas and forge lateral connections to achieve goals.
High performing teams will also understand that within a business, a team’s output is likely to have dependencies on others. If a team cannot connect well and use those dependencies to their advantage, it makes it nigh on impossible for the team to reach its full potential.
That’s because a team is rarely a finite being. It is only perhaps a sports team which operates within a strict framework of rules that only needs to concern itself with its own performance.
Put a team within a commercial context, demanding interaction with people from the wider company or from outsiders, then forging connections elsewhere becomes essential as nurturing relationships across the organisation is never just a nice-to-have. It’s the linchpin for a team’s ultimate success. For instance, in a school, teachers and management teams need to work in tandem and in conjunction with one another, but also with outside stakeholders, such as the council or healthcare professionals.
There will undoubtedly be some individuals that are better suited to building those external connections, while for others forging bonds comes less naturally. That’s not to say, though, that connectivity is just a task for team members who are able to build social capital.
To encourage less gregarious members, leaders should emphasise that connections, within a commercial remit, are not just built by networking or socialising. They are also built upon collaboration and a rapport formed through sharing tasks and experience. Collaboration, in fact, is arguably the most crucial way to strengthen connections between teams and has the potential to be the strongest route to building a team’s reputation for the better.
It can be tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that connectivity is a forced connection forged through self-promotion, a means of shirking responsibilities, or a platform for idle chitchat. Instead, it’s about genuine intent, steering clear of leveraging undue favours or engaging in conduct that undermines team objectives.
Avoiding these traps can be difficult to do, while connectivity can also be a hard condition to master for your team. Generally speaking, motivating a team to work well with others is tough because, at first, those potential connections may appear to have little present benefit. However, high performing teams will be able to see that all relationships can be leveraged in the future to gain value. Even weaker social ties can be advantageous. They may be a little more transitory in nature, but at the right time they can open up immense potential.
At Goldcrest Partners, we see connectivity as a condition that fortifies high performance teams. That’s why we work closely with leaders and their teams to encourage them to see that building connections with others can be so useful – ultimately improving productivity over the short and the long term. Connections are where collaborative brilliance is forged and can help a team, and the wider company within which it sits, hit its goals and targets.