Teamwork
Emotionally secure individuals make the best team players.
Secure competent individuals understand the power of teamwork. Secure individuals are comfortable with sharing information because they know that their creativity and growth come from sharing ideas.
Teamwork requires an understanding and an individual commitment to achieving goals together–a willing commitment to make things happen in concert with others. This makes teamwork difficult for insecure individuals who are afraid to share their knowledge or themselves with others.
Teamwork means using the strengths of each individual in brainstorming, planning, problem-solving, and allowing the experience and abilities of each team member to have a voice. Because it’s exciting to be empowered, individuals are more willing to participate in creating solutions, setting goals, and executing them with a greater sense of urgency.
Making 1+1=3 . . . or more!
Working in teams means allowing a free flow of ideas, which opens the door to disagreement and debate. From time to time, working as a team will mean allowing the most qualified person to lead. Unlike cooperative groups, real business teams do not meet, just for the sake of meeting. Teams meet to share responsibility, share the load, find solutions to problems, and work out ways to be more effective. In a nutshell, teams meet to find more efficient ways to achieve goals that ripple out to manifest the organization’s vision.
Teamwork focuses on directing individual creativity, energy, experience, and ability toward a shared destiny; and it requires a greater understanding of human behavior. Interpersonal communication must remain sensitive, proactive, flexible and in some cases, tolerant of mood changes, circumstances, and different personalities. A good team will make their differences their strengths–as opposed to groups of people who will form cliques and fall into the trap of “group-think,” seeing differences as incompatibility.
Supporting differences does not mean consensus and agreement just for the sake of harmony, or to create warm feelings amongst the team members–it means directing those differences as strengths toward goals in the same way you would with experience and skills. For example, motivated, talkative, social initiators may be difficult to handle in a team, but their strength in verbal communications and social situations would make them the most qualified to present ideas to larger meetings and upper management, thus bringing victory to the team. When you focus on the strengths of others, you build trust and respect. When you focus on the weaknesses of others, you foster conflict and distrust.
As with Olympic sports teams, good business teams are continuously looking for ways to improve their performances–by carefully examining how the last project was carried out and how the goal was or was not achieved and by asking the all important questions: “What could we do better?” and “What do we need to improve?” In this way, the team becomes comfortable with critical evaluation and measurement and through continuous improvement, more successful.
Synergy Is the Secret.
There are a number of extremely valuable strategic reasons why teamwork has been at the center of success for thousands of companies . . . large and small:
Who Do You Thank?
Charles Plumb, a Navy pilot on his 70th mission, was shot down and unfortunately parachuted into enemy territory. He was captured and spent several years in an enemy prison. Upon his release along with many others, he was interviewed on national television and this led him to give lectures on the lessons he learned from his experience.
One day, some years later, a man approached him in a restaurant: “Are you Charles Plumb?”
“Yes–do I know you?” asked Plumb.
“Not directly,” the man replied, “but I was the sailor who packed your parachute on your last mission.”
Plumb, amazed and grateful, thanked the man. “If that chute didn’t open, I wouldn’t be here today.”
“I was just doing my job as part of the team,” the sailor replied.
Plumb realized that this sailor, like so many others, held the pilots’ lives in their hands. They did it with diligence, commitment, and with great care. Because they were a part of a dedicated team, they never expected recognition.
“Who Packs Your Parachute?” Who helps you through life, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually? Be grateful to them for doing their part and recognize them by saying “thank you”!