To create a collaborative team environment, you need to be able to recognize and accept how each member’s skillsets augment your strengths and weaknesses. That recognition and acceptance are the starting points for team building that creates a desire to stick together in tough times. These activities are easier to perform if you have a firm understanding of how our conscious and nonconscious minds interact.

Social Skills Are Powerful Teambuilding Assets

In a collaborative team environment, individual members are more efficient at their jobs because they understand the other’s strengths and weaknesses better. In turn, this help build trust within the group, which adds to job satisfaction.

Influence and Persuasion Are Different People Skills

You build a collaborative team environment through persuasion, which includes the use of language, body language and visual cues. Persuasion includes cognitive biases such as social proof, reciprocity, and authority bias.

You can also build it through influence. Influence is more durable than persuasion, but it also takes a lot more up-front effort. To influence a decision, you first have to gain the trust of the deciding party. If you ever violate that trust, you your ability to influence them evaporates.

This video presents a layman’s perspective on the conscious and nonconscious minds interacting to turn teambuilding to an artform.