How to Ensure Teamwork Within My Team?

I am the a program manager of a 14 bed girls facility and I am having a hard time having the staff become a team. Working as a team is important so that the girls do not split staff and triangulate… Any suggestions?

The Team Doc Says…

You must have a good foundation for your team to ensure they work well together. My favorite way to look at the basics that are needed for a team, is to use the definition coined by Katzenbach and Smith in their book The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. They say:

“A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”

Every component in this definition must be in place within your team to function at its most productive. You can read the full definition of a team here.

The key points for helping your team work better together to provide a united front is to have a team based on trust and open communication. There is nothing that can separate a team with these components in place.