As a company you always strive for the strongest possible competitive position. And of course towards an organization that is as effective and efficient as possible. Yet we often forget to emphasize what is crucial; social capital! You can put all the bright minds together, but if they are not willing to share their knowledge and protect each other from possible risks, the team will never perform. Without rely, knowledge, reciprocity and shared values, performance will be suboptimal.

The individual is not decisive

Research by Thomas Malone, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), shows that the intelligence of the individual within a team is absolutely not decisive for the ability to solve problems. In fact, pooling the intelligence of all team members is not enough either. Other factors play a more important role. What factors are those?

No 'cock behavior'

Just like within a football team, so-called cocky behavior can also cause problems in your team. Too many dominant people in a team disrupts the balance. In order to perform well, it is very important that everyone has time to talk, without monitoring or regulation. Especially in the case of brainstorms, it all too often happens that input is rejected by dominant people, or that the same people always speak. This hinders the results. Everyone should be able to participate without inhibitions!

Empathy works!

Empathy, what does it actually mean? By empathy we mean the ability and skill to put yourself in the life and feelings of someone else. So empathy. Very important for a good team balance. How do you create empathy? This is best described with an example. A businesswoman who had to bring together different corporate cultures after a merger had different departments of her organization put together a budget for their own department. Nothing unusual so far. They then had to explain this as best they could to colleagues from another department, who had to defend it to management. For example, the head of Marketing defended the needs of the technology department, the Chief Technology Officer defended the budget for customer care, etc. The result; strong empathy between the different departments through a better understanding of each other's interests and bottlenecks!

Gender has an influence

Everyone has a preference in terms of gender to work with. Some people really like the social nature of female employees, while others prefer the more distant approach of male employees in their team. As is often the case, and completely in line with the Dutch Polder Model, the solution lies in the middle. Gender has a major influence on the balance in your team. It is therefore advisable to have not only male team members, but also women. Women contribute greatly to empathy within a team and therefore play a very important role.

Do you want to know everything about managing a team, so that you too can get the most out of your employees? Then you have come to the right place at Kenneth Smit. Take a look at our extensive range management training.