Building meaningful connections: a key to successful project teams

Humans are social beings. During childhood, many of our needs are met through collaboration with family, friends, and teachers. Our lives flourish within the context of the communities that surround us — and the support those communities offer.

As adults, the same applies in the corporate environment, where meaningful relationships drive the success of businesses, functional teams, and individuals. Natural extroverts aren’t guaranteed workplace success, nor are introverts doomed to fail. Regardless of your disposition, the ability to build rewarding and productive connections comes down to focus and intention. These “soft” skills can be developed, just as skills like programming or digital design can be learned.

At ArcTouch, we help our clients forge connections with their customers through the digital experiences we create. To successfully build lovable apps and websites, our diverse product teams must also create meaningful connections with each other. These bonds allow us to collaborate, solve problems, and innovate together.

In this post, we share seven key values that our project team members embrace.

1. Intentionality

All interactions have a purpose. Before starting a project, a team meeting, or a conversation with stakeholders, take a few seconds to reflect upon possible outcomes. What are your short, medium, and longer-term goals? Is your intent for that interaction to solve a problem? Or to build closeness with the team? Maybe to strengthen the relationship with a new teammate or stakeholder? Be intentional. Focus on the expected result and calibrate your approach to achieve it.

2. Listening

Active listening is a valuable tool in interpersonal relationships in all spheres. Often, the solution to a work challenge or opportunity is implicit in what your team members, colleagues, or clients tell you. Pay attention to non-verbal communication and observe the environment. Try not to dominate conversations. Embrace opportunities to listen and collect information before taking a position or acting towards a goal.

3. Availability

Being available is critical to moving things forward. But that doesn’t mean individuals must immediately abandon the current tasks to attend to the latest Slack message. You should make regular time and space to address and respond to issues in a way that is efficient for both you and the requester. Also, organize your routine to ensure space for cultivating relationships. — not only for urgent matters. Sometimes, a five-minute exchange can optimize processes and mitigate risks for months — while casual exchanges may help you learn something about your peers that makes your work relationship more rewarding. Be available.

4. Consistency

Trust among team members is crucial. And nothing destroys trust more than inconsistent behavior. Missing deadlines, showing up late for meetings, and offering excuses will break trust and cause rifts in your relationships. Be consistent. Determine a communication cadence with team members that suits your goals. Be accountable for your commitments. And make your expectations for others clear.

5. Transparency

Secrets are the shortest path to crises in the work environment. Communicate, including failures, with transparency. If you need to make a change to a team, you don’t need to disclose any interpersonal problems. Use honesty and maturity to explain big shifts in a team structure, with justification for the change, and without embellishments. Be transparent.

6. Vulnerability

Part of being transparent means showing vulnerability. You don’t always need to know the answers and you shouldn’t fear making mistakes. Acknowledge faults and risks. Say “I don’t know” and seek help and answers from your teammates. Verbalize shared and sometimes uncomfortable feelings. In a high-stress work environment, it might feel like there’s little room for error. But nobody gets it right all the time. Being openly vulnerable will also foster trust among your team members.

7. Genuine fun

Having “fun” while working provides many benefits. Team-building activities and company social events help us forge relationships. But there’s space for fun” within our daily work regimens, too. If deadline pressure or a tense meeting is causing too much stress, that discomfort can negatively affect productivity and team morale. Take a moment for a quick team activity or prompt a conversation that brings team members humor or pleasure. Good leaders find ways to reduce tension with genuine fun and make their team members comfortable – so they can do their best work.

About ArcTouch

ArcTouch has been creating lovable apps for companies of all sizes since the dawn of the App Store. Contact us today if you’d like to learn more about our services.