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Without much ado I will say that the truth about team chemistry is that it helps to increase the productivity of a project. By far, it is considered to be the most complicated team aspect to manage. A good team chemistry can get the best out of team members cohesively so as to reach the goals effectively. But a bad chemistry will never take an organization to achieve its results in an effective manner, no matter how high the talent coefficient of the team is.

Productivity in a project team is not only defined by the talent, knowledge and experience that it congregates, but is also defined by the vibes that flow between the team mates. Apart from the experience and subject knowledge, factors such as personality traits, physical looks, self-grooming, dressing style, personal aspirations, intellectual stimulation – all have meaningful impact on deciding a team’s chemistry. Yes, it’s a fact and many studies have been done in this area in order to understand the ways of getting the best results out of team work. You will appreciate all this better with context to my earlier article.  It talks about few other factors which can help raise the productivity in a project.

What is Team Chemistry?

I would define team chemistry as the subtle vibes that interact and intersect at certain nodes of communication between the team members – both at the conscious and subconscious levels of human psyche, defining the relationships among team members which can result in either harmonious cohesion for achieving goals, or disintegrated apathy among the team members. The attitude, subconscious and the body language of a person have a big role to play in the entire dynamics of team chemistry.

That brings us to wonder, what are the variables in organizational behaviour that evolve team chemistry? Some of them are:

1. Competencies of team members, e.g., Knowledge, experience and skills of people
2. Communication skills, i.e., mannerisms to convey messages
3. Role-taking capabilities, e.g., Willingness to take responsibilities, to conform to informal norms within a team and to show a supportive attitude towards fellow team members
4. Leadership skills, e.g., Demonstrating leadership qualities during crisis situations
5. Motivational persona, i.e., willingness to extend motivation to the fellow team members
6. Appreciative attitude, i.e., being appreciative of each other’s efforts
7. Personal goals and visions
8. The team size

Managing Team Chemistry

Identifying the variables that affect the team chemistry is half the battle won. It will help you to work out the plans around these variables so as to foster good team chemistry and manage it also. Some of the ways that you can adopt are:

1. Effective leadership skills should be in place to manage productivity in any project and this also helps as a catalyst to promote effective team chemistry. Effective leadership shows clear guidance to the team members thereby removing the elements of uncertainty. This removes stress and brings in happiness and satisfaction. Happiness in turn makes people want to be good to each other and this further nurtures good team chemistry.
2. Social networking culture should be inculcated. Social networking culture brings out the celebrity side of the people and they want to be their best. If you can foster social networking culture in your teams within the bounds of the organizational behaviour, then good team chemistry can be built and managed well.
3. Relationship building should be practiced by the managers in a team to establish empathetic culture with the team members. Building a relationship with the team members will help you as a team leader understand the problems in the personal lives of your team members, which otherwise will not be revealed by them. Once you understand the bottlenecks of your team members, you will be able to bring out the best performance from your team mates.
4. Team renewal should be considered as an option after certain time period as the teams wear out. You as a leader or a manager must learn to spend time on team renewal or shuffle it by either adding new recruits or making a team rotation.
5. New employee will bring change in the team chemistry. This is because the equilibrium of the certainty gets disturbed by induction of an ‘unknown’ variable and that is the lack of information about the new team recruit. So if you are adding new recruits to a team then you as a manager must not ignore proper team induction as addition of the new element (new recruit) could cause new reactions to spur. This chemistry may or may not remain good and effective for achieving the organization’s goals.

What is your take?