How to Increase Your Team’s Connection and Cohesion
Every one loves a working environment where they feel needed, respected and in flow. Another way of saying this is that you feel connected to the team’s purpose and the team works cohesively.
At ELEV^TE Venture Studio, we’re a completely remote team, with teammates in multiple time zones (and some with alternative sleeping habits). We cannot depend on connection and cohesion coming from location or time.
Most companies are now struggling to go remote after depending on mutual location and time for years, and waiting for the day when they can reconvene with spatial and temporal security.
At ELEV^TE, we have the advantage of only one choice: organizing based on purpose. More so, our product is not a mobile application, engineering services or management consulting. We’re a venture studio, meaning we collectively use diverse skills to create successful business ventures.
Creating a successful business is anything but straightforward. This means our success is completely dependent on how well we navigate the twists and turns of startup life as a team.
While creating successful ventures is plenty challenging, getting a team of radically diverse experts is a greater challenge to moving our vision forward. When we can individually and collaboratively deliver the best of our artistries, our future is unlimited.
Our artistries rarely look like painted canvas or musical notes. Rather, our art looks like lines of code on the backend, frontend and deployment, narrating pitch decks, designing vital dashboards, and leading one another to our potential.
In other words, the key to our success is how well each of us individually performs our art connected to the company’s purpose, while cohesively working with the team’s diverse disciplines. Read why we have People + Culture Development and not an HR team.
Before we increase such connection and cohesion, there needs to be a clear consensus on the meaning of the terms and a baseline sense of how connected and cohesive a team is to begin. Once these are established, then teammates can collectively work to increase them.
Clarifying Connection + Cohesion
Both connection and cohesion are intangible, personal feelings. To say that a team “feels connected” to company purpose and “feels cohesive” are incorrect, because a team cannot feel.
Yet, since we intuitively know feelings of connection and cohesion exist, we can measure individual feelings of connectedness and cohesion. Before we discuss measuring, we will commonly define these individual terms.
Connection Defined
Connection is a state of being when someone or something is linked with something else. In the context of a team, an individual’s connection to the group’s purpose determines how well they individually and collectively perform.
You likely know your skills and purpose on the team, i.e. frontend engineer, DevOps, or marketing. While this is key, connection begins when you know how your individual purpose is linked to creating the team and company’s purpose. In other words, if the vision is to change mental health, how do your skills and life purpose relate to that?
Imagine yourself at the center of your team’s vision. Ask:
Are you engaged?
When you are engaged, you have a mental and emotional bond with the work and the team. Behaviors such as diligence, passion, enthusiasm are outwardly displayed.
Are you authentic?
When you are authentic, you’re showing up as your true self and are willing to be vulnerable. Often others can feel authenticity, yet true fullness of self can only be detected from within. Only when teammates are authentically themselves can they establish a true connection to their work.
Are you communicating?
The root word of communication is “commune,” meaning to share and live as a united group. As such, in contrast to popular thought, communication is not just the act of expressing oneself; it’s the act of listening so that there is a communing result.
When a team is connected, communication is based on this communal understanding. Communication is incomplete if you do not feel heard or understood, despite good intentions.
Do you feel like you belong?
When you have a sense of belonging, you feel like your role in the group is essential to the ultimate goal. To assure belonging among team members, team leads need to understand how to cultivate inclusion, role specificity, and recognition, so all team members feel like they belong.
Do you feel motivated?
How connected you feel to the outcomes’ purpose is vividly displayed by your conviction to achieve. Theories abound on how to cultivate such internal drives. While external motivators can incentivize this internal behavior, they’re insufficient to sustain long-term cognitive results. True motivation comes from a deep understanding of the goal’s purpose and a sense of belonging to the achievement of the goals.
Cohesion Defined
While it’s great if you feel connected to the team’s purpose, if the team is not operating cohesively, there won’t be results.
Cohesion means a united whole. Adapted from the well-known DiSC Model, each behavior that signifies cohesion builds upon the others to move the team toward the desired outcomes.
Trust = Personal + Work
When a teammate trusts their team and leaders, they feel a security to be vulnerable, to show their humanness, to try and fail, which is absolutely fundamental to creating elevated results. To determine your level of trust for another team member, think about two things: 1. If you’re vulnerable, can you trust her to keep the information confidential and not judge you? 2. Can you trust him to complete his assigned tasks on time and adequately?
Conflict = Constructive or destructive?
Teams often avoid conflict to spare people’s feelings. However, with a basic level of trust and conflict reframing, tension can be the source of the team’s creativity and achievement. When managed mindfully, conflict challenges are opportunities to identify gaps and blindspots of understanding. While challenging in the moment, constructive conflict ultimately creates a greater sense of cohesion in the long-term.
Commitment = Passive consensus or company connection?
With trust and constructive conflict, individuals feel cohesion emerge from overcoming challenges as a team. As a result, teams go beyond passive consensus to individually committing to the team’s purpose. When team members understand and feel secure with tension resolution, commitment to the team’s success rises.
Accountability = Internal or external?
Ideally, trust, constructive conflict, and commitment build so that individuals hold themselves responsible for their tasks. With a mutual sense of responsibility for the team’s outcomes, team members unite in their accountability to the purpose. Further, this level of accountability goes beyond simply completing individual assignments; rather, team members know their own integrity for the potential effort and diligence in completing their roles.
Results = United or weakest link?
If truly cohesive, the team’s goals surpass individual goals, creating collaborative outcomes that go beyond anything that can be produced individually. When cohesive, results don’t feel laborious and heavy. Results from the united whole feel almost inevitable.
Once a team is clear on what connection and cohesion mean individually and collectively, then take a baseline measurement of where they are starting.
Measure via the Scientific Method
Like any living organism, an organization of humans is in constant motion. Accordingly, there is little factual evidence for how to create intangible concepts of connection and cohesion for a specific group, at any specific time.
The best we can do is consistent trial and error, always adapting to the ever-changing environment and feedback. This is why our understanding and increasing of the concepts use the scientific method.
Scientific Method = Experiment + Observation
Through setting a hypothesis, experimenting with variables, and observing the results, we will always be in practice of creating connection and cohesion.
Like the agile method of business and product builds, you can use this scientific feedback loop to measure team skills by building a prototype, measuring the feedback, learning from the insights to improve our connection and cohesion again and again.
At ELEV^TE, we surmise that when our team is more connected to the company’s purpose and operating cohesively — while maintaining individual cognitive diversity — the more we elevate.
Given that the build of connection and cohesion are virtually immeasurable, we use verbal feedback through a Net-Promoter Score (NPS) Survey.
The NPS Survey is an index of 1–10 that measures the willingness of users to recommend a product, correlating to users’ overall satisfaction. When users score their willingness between 9–10, they’re very satisfied; between 7–8 they’re neutral; 6 and below are unsatisfied.
In this case, the “product” is how connected an individual feels to the team. As defined above, connection feels like strong engagement, authenticity, communication, motivation, and belonging.
Based on the average of each teammate’s scores, we can evaluate the cohesion of our team, meaning how well trust will influence constructive conflict, commitment to the collaboration, accountability to production and ultimately the desired results.
Increase Connection + Cohesion
We know that connection and cohesion skills require at a minimum three basic elements:
- Common direction
- Common rules and values
- Common language
A basic level of these three elements are required for a business to remotely function. Yet, how a business operationalizes these determines whether the team’s elevate to success.
Here is how we at ELEV^TE Venture Studio improve upon the common elements to increase our Connection and Cohesion:
Elevated Direction
To align the goals and tasks of a diverse group of individuals to move in a united direction, most companies create a mission and vision. Typically, these kinds of statement orient teams to what’s important.
For example at E^, our mission is to…
Grow leaders who catalyze human-centered ventures.
And our vision is to…
To change the future of how investors convert capital and ideas into businesses that drive the economy.
In the midst of their everyday to-dos, however, people tend to forget what the mission and vision even contain, let alone how their tasks relate to these high level concepts.
That’s why we’ve taken it a step further using the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). This method of goal-setting has assisted many startups, including Google and Intel, in connecting teams to the organization’s purpose and creating high-performance cohesion.
While simple on the surface, finding a flow with OKRs makes it a lifelong practice.
In fact, in the first few months our E^ team tried OKRs, we failed miserably. We set too ambitious goals, didn’t keep track effectively, and failed to integrate them into our day-to-day work. Then we came across Dave Bailey’s article on how to implement OKRs in early stage start-ups.
He highlighted the challenge of finding an OKR flow without product-to-market fit, which we didn’t have at the time. The article encouraged us to persevere and provided a step-by-step process to make the method effective. As a result, we improved our approach and we’re now succeeding in directing our team forward.
This is an early example of how we translated why we do what we do into how we do it:
While any team can be great with a common mission and vision, without a technique to operationalize these concepts, it’s tough to find deep connection to daily work.
The OKR method allows our team to elevate our direction and ultimately our connection and cohesion.
Elevated Rules + Values
Connection and Cohesion are also commonly formed through unifying rules and values.
It’s typical for companies to provide lists of nice-sounding values and a legal handbooks for new employees. The hope is that explicit expectations will point teams in a positive cultural connection. Generally, however, few employees could tell you the content of the handbook or values.
Nice-sounding values are now proven to be merely words. For example, Enron had nice-sounding values, like integrity, communication, respect and excellence. In fact, these four values were chiseled into their marble lobby, but as we know, their behavior had little to do with their values.
Since ELEV^TE Venture Studio is based on the effectiveness of our team, it’s essential that we elevate our rules and values approach. Again, since our mission is to grow leaders, our teammates need to feel trusted and know how to center their humanness through these tool.
If we expect that detailed handbook rules will reign in misdeeds, then we’re using an external moral compass to guide our team’s behavior. On the flip side, many wrongdoings specified in handbooks go too far in limiting behavior and could risk expelling our most valued players on technicalities.
So instead of a handbook of countless rules and nice-sounding values that no one can recall, we have one — yes ONLY one — rule.
Indeed, this is broad, but if our goal is to raise leaders then we need to allow for trust and experimental wiggle room.
The phrase “Be in integrity” means that teammates must act mindfully towards what they value and align with those values. This approach requires teammates to hone their own intuition of right and wrong, imbuing them with trust and freedom. For a further explanation on how we define and approach integrity in conflict resolution, please reference the E^ Integrity Model.
When we say “in all situations,” we intend this to encompass anything from vacation time to sexual harassment to confidentiality. If a teammate was enrolled into the E^ vision, they appeared to one of our teammates to intuitively know right and wrong. More so, they likely know what typical handbooks address and what’s legally wrong (if you‘re curious, research “employee handbooks”). When in doubt as to whether this phrase includes a specific situation, it’s their responsibility to ask.
This is why what matters is not MORE rules and values, but that our approach sparks a culture of leadership.
Culture is often said to be, in brief, “who we hire, fire, and admire.” Rather than leaving such people choices up to history and chance, we believe that culture can be designed, directed and moldable. Hence, in addition to our 1 Golden Rule, we spend more time detailing and learning a “Culture Code,” or a guide to the people operating system.
A Culture Code contains guidelines for a team to maintain the values they believe in. Instead of nice-sounding values or compliance rules, a Culture Code shares actionable virtues that define the characteristics of a team.
Unlike hard and fast rules, the code is a real-time, ever-changing, living and breathing expression of a team’s identity — who we are and who we aspire to be. As such, it’s open to feedback and iteration, forever being improved.
Our Culture Code is the written version of E^’s expected cultural norms. When taught and enacted well, the Code shapes our behaviors by setting clear expectations for current and future employees. By sharing a common reference for cultural values and virtues, everyone is given a voice to address deviances in a safe, constructive way.
By clearly articulating a Culture Code that speaks to our emphasis on connection and cohesion, we improve our ability to attract and enroll talent who match our desired leadership culture.
Attracting talent that matches our ideal culture enables us to avoid culture dilution and positively reinforce our desired culture over time. Ultimately, this supports the creation of a safer place to work and a high-performance culture.
Notably, violations of the code are not punishable offenses. Rather, they’re deviances that signal information for our organization (read: organism) to grow. Either we correct the behavior, which gives us the opportunity to determine a “culture match,” OR we edit the Culture Code.
Elevated Language: Glossary, Dashboard, Podcast (Bonus: Medium)
The third basic way to increase connection and cohesion is through language.
Given multilingual, multicultural, multidisciplinary teams, we need to expanding the definition of language beyond English, Spanish, Russian, and so on.
Language can be the unique team lingo, the said, the unsaid, body language, the way Jira tickets are written (or not written) and beyond. Communication of all sorts speak what’s ultimately important to the team.
Company glossaries, dictionaries and dashboards are helpful because the most important information is located in one place. As a result, the team repeatedly learns why, what and how things work.
Teams never need to create a new language. The terms, important concepts and phrases will arise on their own out of necessity to integrate team members. The key here is to make the location common and easily accessible.
At E^, we have three key ways we record our common language:
1. Glossary… unique team terms.
Here are some terms that are unique to the E^ team:
2. Project Dashboards… project-specific bullet points.
For each project, there is a centralized dashboard for referencing engineering timelines and business decisions. With this common repository of language, we elevate our team cohesion and connection to the vision.
3. Podcast… team concepts in audible form.
The E^ podcast is internal and constantly being built. As we uncover new topics and diverse ways of thinking, we create short minisodes for our team to get on the same page.
4. Bonus: Medium… public information.
This is how we gather a community outside of our E^ team. The E^ Medium page contains useful concepts for entrepreneurs, engineers, and leaders to learn and provide feedback about.
Again, the three key elements to create Connection and Cohesion for any team are direction, rules/values and language. We elevate those elements by living by our OKRs, Golden Rule and Culture Code, and common language systems.
Staying connected to a vision and being a cohesive team is how you can assure continued success for years to come.
Please let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improving our methods for Connection + Cohesion. What worked for you here? What didn’t?
