Teamwork needs training... because no matter how social you are, or how professional you are, or how expert in your field, good teamwork is fraught with difficulty. An expert manager must be social, professional, and expert.
A team brings greater leverage, but on the flip side, problems in a team can have a compounding effect on poor performance for each individual team member. And managing a team comes with a web of factors to untangle and control. So just what are the constraints of teamwork?
Different ideas, abilities, objectives and motivators, can limit a team's achievements. Resource constraints will slow the team down regardless of training. Lack of visible planning both from upper management and from each individual team member will reduce the team's capacity.
Through research and observation over my work as a senior marketing manager in various companies both large and small, I believe we can describe the fundamentals of poor teamwork in 4 broad categories: Limits caused by upper management. Limits caused by team managers. Limits caused in team cohesion. Limits with individual team members
"The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime." - Babe Ruth
Problems, problems, problems. Upper management wants to have it's say, and often causes disruption for teamwork. Team managers themselves often lack the experience of successfully guiding team collaboration and performance. Thus teams do not have the cohesion of a purposefully aligned team, and there may even be specific problems with individual members of the team such as resistance to change, incompetence, or just plain old chronic laziness.
What kind of teamwork training is best partly depends on the situation and the team, but it's easy enough to appreciate that the solution to teamwork training can be described with 3 components: Outcome, Constraints and Processes.
Outcome means the identification of what you want to achieve via the team. Both the team's grand purpose or objective, as well as it's collaborative projects which lead towards that overall desired outcome.
Constraints management means knowing where you are and what's in the way of getting to where you want.
Operations are the ways and means (the 'how to') for achieving the identified outcome through projects and process by eliminating the constraints.
That might seem somewhat circular, and it is. That's why it is an undeniably clear and precise protocol on which to base teamwork training for success. It's easy to see how clarity of outcomes, managing constraints, and managing the throughput of activities will facilitate greater cohesion within the team.
A team brings greater leverage, but on the flip side, problems in a team can have a compounding effect on poor performance for each individual team member. And managing a team comes with a web of factors to untangle and control. So just what are the constraints of teamwork?
Different ideas, abilities, objectives and motivators, can limit a team's achievements. Resource constraints will slow the team down regardless of training. Lack of visible planning both from upper management and from each individual team member will reduce the team's capacity.
Through research and observation over my work as a senior marketing manager in various companies both large and small, I believe we can describe the fundamentals of poor teamwork in 4 broad categories: Limits caused by upper management. Limits caused by team managers. Limits caused in team cohesion. Limits with individual team members
"The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime." - Babe Ruth
Problems, problems, problems. Upper management wants to have it's say, and often causes disruption for teamwork. Team managers themselves often lack the experience of successfully guiding team collaboration and performance. Thus teams do not have the cohesion of a purposefully aligned team, and there may even be specific problems with individual members of the team such as resistance to change, incompetence, or just plain old chronic laziness.
What kind of teamwork training is best partly depends on the situation and the team, but it's easy enough to appreciate that the solution to teamwork training can be described with 3 components: Outcome, Constraints and Processes.
Outcome means the identification of what you want to achieve via the team. Both the team's grand purpose or objective, as well as it's collaborative projects which lead towards that overall desired outcome.
Constraints management means knowing where you are and what's in the way of getting to where you want.
Operations are the ways and means (the 'how to') for achieving the identified outcome through projects and process by eliminating the constraints.
That might seem somewhat circular, and it is. That's why it is an undeniably clear and precise protocol on which to base teamwork training for success. It's easy to see how clarity of outcomes, managing constraints, and managing the throughput of activities will facilitate greater cohesion within the team.
About the Author:
See more on this research at www.teamworktraining.org. Read another article by the author on team building.
