Who can go it alone in business world? Maybe someone like Leonardo Da Vinci or Albert Einstein. For them, magnificent ideas and insights are all in a day's work. The rest of us need the help of colleagues and associates who pool their talents and creativity, their energy, motivation, and support into work teams to achieve a common goal
In today's organisations, teams are the way work gets done. To be sure, individual contributors still have brilliant ideas and continue to make insightful decisions, but eventually those ideas and decisions are improved or implemented in the context of a team.
Let's define the characteristics of a team. A team has a clear, common goal, something everyone understands and believes in the goal could be sales target, the development of a new process, or managing a group business units. Whatever it is, achieving the goal is clearly the reason the team exists.
Another characteristics is that individuals have to work together to achieve the goal. People on a team are dependent on each other's expertise, perspective and efforts. When you think about it, an orhanisation is staffed with individuals who have different levels of expertise - financial, planners, technical wizards, sales specialists and marketing mavens. Even in a work group where people do similar tasks, there are people with varying skills. When the power of those different perspectives and skills are effectively and efficiently brought to bear on a problem or challenge, the results can be awesome.
Finally, when a team goal is achieved, there is a payoff for all the team members. Achievement is shared, rewards are distributed, everyone wins.
Why teams? Studies have repeatedly shown that the quality of decisions and level of creativity emerging from teams are substantially better than from average individuals working alone. A great team produces fast, creative, wise, decisive, consistent results. The points is no one can go it alone. People need to get together to share ideas for achieving a common goal.
Part of making a team work is to have all team members pay close attention to how ideas are expressed, whether team members are listened to and included, whether the team is working. Being attentive to the team process is a critical ingredient to success.
A that wants to be world-class also needs to stop and ponder how it is doing as a team every once in a while. Improvement comes through reflection.
Remember, these are skills that sharpen the effectiveness of teams. These skills can be learned and practiced by the team.
"Individual commitment to group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work" -Vince Lombardi-
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