18 September 2008

Building teamwork

By Jim Pinto

Businesses need leaders who have a vision, can create a plan, and then effectively communicate their vision and plan to a strong team. Individuals in the team need to be strong enough to critique and mold the ideas—beyond just being “yes-men”—and yet capable of collaborating at the team level. Team members must be capable people who accept personal responsibility for the mission while coordinating and cooperating with other team members to execute the plan. Teamwork, leadership, and communication are the keys to accomplishing the mission and ultimately the vision of the organization.

The leadership challenge is to build teams that work well together and motivate people to achieve success together. In fact, organizations are basically about people working together, and therefore effective team building should be a priority for anyone looking to achieve success in business. If you are responsible for building a high performing team, then the quality of your team-building management training could be the key to your success.

A team can be a group of people working together to achieve a common goal. “Team building” is the process of enabling that group of people to achieve that goal. Teamwork is not a quick process.

There are four stages of teamwork building: “Form, Storm, Norm, and Perform.” Anyone can get a group of employees together to “form” a team. It takes an unusual leader to move quickly through the “storm”—getting different personalities to work together, complementing their strengths and weaknesses, eliminating the prima-donnas and encouraging the quiet thinkers. Once that difficult stage has been accomplished, the team gets to settle down to “norm”—the development of goals, objectives, plans, budgets, and timeframes. Then it is time to “perform,” to achieve success as a team.

The exciting part of teamwork is the success. And, of course, success breeds success. The team knows how to work together, to coordinate, predict, tackle, and score. The sports-metaphors abound. It is hard to beat a winning team.

Old “boss-subordinate” mechanisms do not facilitate teamwork. People will need to enter into new kinds of dialogues and debates to develop mutual trust and teamwork.

The ongoing generation of new products and services requires teamwork and company-wide commitment. Faced with the ongoing challenge of growing your business and maintaining its role as an industry leader, management must be committed to exploring ways of making teamwork and innovation a day-to-day reality.

Related Links:

• How to Build a Teamwork Culture
  http://humanresources.about.com/od/involvementteams/a/team_culture.htm
• Team work and team building essentials
  http://www.time-management-guide.com/team-building.html
• Twelve Tips for Team Building
  http://humanresources.about.com/od/involvementteams/a/twelve_tip_team.htm

Behind the byline

Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and founder of Action Instruments. You can e-mail him at jim@jimpinto.com or view his writings at www.JimPinto.com. Read the Table of Contents of his book, Pinto’s Points, at www.jimpinto.com/writings/points.html.