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.
Through a team you achieve leverage. However, problems within teams can cause poor performance with every person on the team. Managing the team to high performance has a whole host of issues to unravel and guide. But what are the true underlying causes of poor 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.
In fact, through primary research as well as my own experience over a decade of work in companies both large and small, I discovered a number of fundamental causes of poor teamwork. They can be grouped under 4 categories: Problems caused by upper management. Problems caused by team managers. Problems caused in team cohesion. Problems 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
Issues, problems, limits, constraints. Senior management has to have it's say, yet can cause untold damage to team performance. Team managers can lack experience with guiding a team. All too often, and it's terribly obvious, team's lack the cohesion required to make it truly great. Individual team members can also be a source of poor performance across the team as a whole.
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.
Managing constraints involves determining the bottlenecks of the team's performance so you know where to focus efforts of improvement.
Operations is the management of projects and/or processes that will help achieve the outcome via eliminating the constraints.
That directive for teamwork training should be crystal clear to any manager and forms the basis of all good team management training. It is not difficult to understand how clarity of purpose, identification of constraints, and focused control of activities is the heart of high team performance.
Through a team you achieve leverage. However, problems within teams can cause poor performance with every person on the team. Managing the team to high performance has a whole host of issues to unravel and guide. But what are the true underlying causes of poor 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.
In fact, through primary research as well as my own experience over a decade of work in companies both large and small, I discovered a number of fundamental causes of poor teamwork. They can be grouped under 4 categories: Problems caused by upper management. Problems caused by team managers. Problems caused in team cohesion. Problems 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
Issues, problems, limits, constraints. Senior management has to have it's say, yet can cause untold damage to team performance. Team managers can lack experience with guiding a team. All too often, and it's terribly obvious, team's lack the cohesion required to make it truly great. Individual team members can also be a source of poor performance across the team as a whole.
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.
Managing constraints involves determining the bottlenecks of the team's performance so you know where to focus efforts of improvement.
Operations is the management of projects and/or processes that will help achieve the outcome via eliminating the constraints.
That directive for teamwork training should be crystal clear to any manager and forms the basis of all good team management training. It is not difficult to understand how clarity of purpose, identification of constraints, and focused control of activities is the heart of high team performance.