Working as a Team

July 17, 2011|Tips At work| No comments yet

Everyone knows that a team wins the championship, and no single player is responsible for the victory. The same principle applies to business. Just think of your competitors as competing teams, and you can start to take on the mindset of a winning athlete. Basketball teams and corporate teams share many goals. The old adage, “there’s no I in team”, is something that’s so deceptively simple that most people forget it. It basically boils down to letting go of your ego and putting yourself in your other group members’ shoes will still retaining your gifts and contributing from who you are.

Workplace dialogue is rife with teamwork talk, but few understand how to effectively work with a team. The core of that idea is working with something larger than yourself. You have to understand the mission objectives of your organization and let go of your own personal ideals. You contribute to the overall goals of your team within your job function.

There are dual team building objectives with any team, and people often confuse them. One of them is to differentiate the overall sense of teamwork with the task of developing a working team to conquer a specific goal. Having a general sense of teamwork is different than having a goal in mind to build a specific team for a purpose.

Lateral, team-based, horizontal, and creative organization structures are the best designs for involving all team members in the decision making process and getting diverse perspectives could be vital to your business. Organizations have many terms for team-based improvement efforts such as total quality or self-directed continuous improvement teams, but the bottom line is that you should be trying to improve results for customers.

Executive leadership should also clearly communicate the goals to the team so the person charged with delegating authority to the team should be as knowledgeable as possible about giving information to the team about how it should be run and what its goals are. Team members should understand why they’re participating in the team and business goals should be communicated effectively. Team members should feel a sense of commitment to making the team be as successful as possible. There should be no lagging in teams because everyone should be on the same page as far as motivation, desire, and energy go.