When individual currents become one force.
Making Team Communication Your Super Power
Life Lessons Communication Leadership
Of all the topics we’ve covered under effective communication, this chapter on team communication is one of my favourites.
I strongly believe in the power of team communication to enhance problem-solving, drive innovation, build camaraderie and team spirit, and create the joy of shared success.
Going back a long time, I remember an executive development program I participated in—along with my Polygram colleagues from around the world—at the London Business School. My principal takeaway (and to be honest, there weren’t many I can remember!) was a single lecture on the benefits of teamwork, where the lecturer gave us a mantra that has stuck with me ever since:
“Nobody is perfect, but a team can be.”
I’ve used that slogan often. I’m a firm believer that if you can create a truly positive and safe team environment, it can often compensate for the shortcomings of a strategy developed in isolation, as well as significantly improve execution.
Teams Don’t Magically Work Without These 3 Preconditions
1. Values and Business Philosophy
Early on, as we set up teams to manage execution, we ran an exercise to define the values we wanted to be held accountable to.
Our Philosophy
At Bromor, we believe the individual skills and talents of our people are the reasons for our success. We seek out exceptional people who perform, who share our common goal, and who are only satisfied with the best.
We recognize the abilities of our people and help to develop them. We encourage initiative and innovation. We respect judgment and individuality.
Most of all, we encourage teamwork—because in the long run, the whole will be more than the sum of its parts.
We attribute our success directly to this philosophy. It has all the right ingredients for our future growth. It extends into our attitude toward our suppliers, customers, and consumers. It results in a pride that is shared by every member of our company.
“It’s this pride inside that sets us apart.”
2. Prior Training in Team Communication Skills
Teams don’t automatically show up to meetings knowing how to communicate effectively, even if individuals have good communication skills. Without training, teams typically fall into common traps: leaders dominating discussions, less confident voices being drowned out, and ideas being presented without real collaboration or listening.
Soon after Bromor was established, we rolled out a comprehensive training program on how to model effective team communication. After training, we created a checklist printed on laminated cards and used these at the end of each meeting to self-assess how well we demonstrated the skills we had been taught.
3. Utilize Team Brainstorming to Tap into Creativity and Find Better Solutions
There are two primary ways to approach problems. Left-brain thinking is analytical and data-driven and ideal for solving manufacturing or financial challenges. Right-brain thinking is more creative and intuitive—ideal for areas like product innovation and sales and marketing strategy.
To unlock right-brain creativity, brainstorming is key. Like running a good meeting, effective brainstorming requires its own rules and best practices per the following:
Who
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Include the right people—ideally a diverse group across functions, experiences, and thinking styles.
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Ideally a mix of seasoned professionals and fresh thinkers, analytical types and creative minds.
What
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Clearly define the problem or opportunity you’re working on. Examples include:
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Determining the best way to grow new membership
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Overcoming a new competitive threat
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Taking advantage of AI tools or trends
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How
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Make it safe: Without psychological safety, where people feel safe to speak up, diversity can backfire. Leaders must ensure all voices are valued.
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Generate as many ideas as possible—without judgment.
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Include every idea, even those that seem silly at first.
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Build on ideas and use the “Yes, and…” approach to build on others’ suggestions.
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Consider breaking into subgroups to work on ideas and present back.
Evaluate
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Have everyone vote anonymously for their top 3 ideas.
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Review the top ideas together. If clarity isn’t achieved, repeat the process until it is.
Highlight ideas that best represent and align with the team values and business philosophy; exclude ideas that work against them.
Execution Strategy
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Once key ideas are selected, move into execution planning—Who? What? Where? When? How?
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Depending on complexity, you might need a second brainstorming round to finalize your strategy.
A Success Story Built on Effective Team Communication and Teamwork
A meaningful slogan or purpose statement is a good starting point, as we discussed in the last post. I’ve spoken before about the slogan, “It’s the pride inside that sets us apart,” which we used to help unite three acquired food companies under our newly created brand, Bromor Foods.
The slogan by itself was not very meaningful. But our people understood it to mean that as the weaker local food companies, we would execute our mission with quiet mission—steadily giving the big, powerful multinationals a run for their money.
This meant removing two of the existing CEOs, replacing agents with our own team, assembling a unified sales and merchandising force, investing in modern product packaging, new product development, brand advertising, and executing a well-thought-out trade marketing plan. We also successfully integrated two small, acquired companies along the way. All of this over a five-year period.
With lots of teamwork and quiet pride, we slowly but surely caught up with—and in many cases overtook—the market leaders in the segments where we competed with the multinationals.
Effective teamwork is not a panacea for everything, but it works remarkably well when the business fundamentals are right, and you have the right people on the bus.
In my experience, teamwork is mostly underappreciated and underused. In some companies, a team exercise is sometimes rolled out at the year-end annual conference. Typically, there’s little preparation: no clear purpose, no guidelines for the discussion, no designated facilitator, and no actionable next steps. Not surprisingly, no meaningful change occurs and “teamwork” gets a tick and is put away in a box for another year.
Summary and Conclusions
Effective communication within a team isn’t just about exchanging information—it’s about leveraging collective intelligence to make better decisions, reduce bias, and foster innovation. When used correctly, team dynamics turn communication into a strategic advantage. Teams help vet ideas more thoroughly, push thinking deeper, and ultimately deliver stronger outcomes.
Team communication, when done well, is a strategic weapon. With intentional team composition, structured communication tools, and an environment of trust and openness, you unlock smarter decisions, greater creativity and more resilient strategies.
Your team’s communication effectiveness and their ability to develop and execute a winning strategy is dependent on these 3× conditions and skills:
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First agree on your higher purpose, answering the question “why are we here” and then determine the values you want to respect and want each other to be held accountable for.
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Undertake team communication skills training, right at the start of any new change program.
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Use effective brainstorming tools.
“Your team individually might not be perfect, but collectively they can be”!
Great stuff Tim, and so important, yet often overlooked . In a start up, where resources are scarce, the power of the team is the make or break component . and all it takes in one broken link to bring the whole business down fast. We cant over state the importance of Values, enpugh. Values collectively is your culture and your brand . When we interview this is the one thing we focus on most , "will you fit in withe our team, our culture. Technical skill can be taught and perfected through practice but Valeus are a lot harder to find . but once we have that right , the strength it brings is amazing.
I endorse this entirely Tim. I’ll just highlight what for me is the most important phrase: “Make it safe.” This is where the best leaders excel and so many others fall down. We hear so much these days about servant leadership, and yet there are still many people in leadership roles who are perhaps insufficiently secure in themselves to encourage contradictory viewpoints (or at least to consider them neutrally). I always found the best ideas came in a truly safe environment where every participant felt free to express their ideas with zero threat of negative consequences.
Thanks for sharing Mark. You are so right, about leaders in particlar, needing to make it truly safe for others to say what they think without fear of negative consquences.We'll talk more about this in the next session on Managing Crucial Conversations.Thanks again!
Thank you for this insightful contribution Brian.You make a very powerful point, that the success of ones brain storming initaitives is in ensuring that the faciliator is the right person.Very often the leader of the group might not have the facilitation skills , have a strong bias about the subject matter and may be intimidating for more junior members of the team.This might then result in performative dialogue. An outside facilitator in this case might be a better option.
Love this, Tim. I'm a big team guy and it's refreshing to see your focus in that area as the topic seems to have been watered down a bit of late. And as you well know and allude to, I'm also huge on team brainstorming. A point I'd emphasize is the criticality of the session leader role. Your five key areas - Who, What, How, Evaluation and Execution Strategy are greatly enhanced with sound and seasoned facilitation to produce maximum impact in addressing the problem du jour. As is often said, you can't force insight but I believe that an effective leader can certainly prompt, welcome and massage it!
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Good article Tim, thank you!
The problem with training (any) is that in most cases, it was an event with very little follow up.
I think it was "Tricky Dickie" Nixon who said "I don't want any "yes men" around my table, even if it costs them their jobs"!
In my last corporate role (before the company shut down Canadian operations) my team was encouraged to come to meetings with critical thibking questions and critism, withour fear of loss (of their jobs)... and they did. And yes, on occasion there was critism of me, but I sucked it up. This alloed risk taking and a better work and team environment.