Much is said about teamwork and its importance to achieve the goals of a company, however, what does it depend on that managers and / or leaders can form highly effective work teams? And above all, sustain it over time?
Now all professionals are able to do we work as a team? What happens then with collaborators who achieve their objectives without requiring teamwork?
In this article, which has a critical, analytical and realistic sense, the reader may also realize that to achieve superior performance as a human team, it will depend mainly on three variables: time, type of difficulty and leadership.
We must be clear that a synchronized and above all effective collective work is the wish of any manager since he has succeeded, or at least influenced, in implementing a harmonious work system in his subordinates.
However, this is not obtained by magic, but it is a process where it begins in a group of people with different personality and emotional characters, who, as time passes, in the face of work situations and their own mistakes, capitalize on them. and determining the own abilities of its members to reach proposed objectives.
I said a crucial word: time, this added to the way of managing that staff, that is, leadership, will generate a true teamwork that is not similar for all areas of a company; The commercial "team" or sales force will be very different from the production "team" or the administrative "team", since each area requires different skills profiles in each employee or work partner of the company.
This, what I say for many of you is not new, but what is new is that TIME is required to achieve synergy in a group of collaborators who obtain results in the face of already experienced work circumstances, since each member, having gone through that Previous experience, knows (or should know) what actions to take, but when a new problem appears, the team must be flexible enough to change the way of doing things and at that moment it is a working group that is adapting to the new situation, understanding not only the difficulty but also the way to face it and when they start to unify actions, there again are work teams, whose result will not be the most optimal but surely that in the face of a similar future difficulty, the result will be better than above. In summary,The process of working in a group and becoming a work team will be shorter in time and this will progressively happen:
- New situation + need to solve it + people working in a group + time + directive leadership = Teamwork with effectiveness level B in their result. Then faced with a similar situation, there is already a teamwork from the beginning (because they already have experience in solving it and they know what actions to carry out) + delegating leader + a shorter time than last time = the result will be A. Later in a similar situation + a delegating leader + a shorter time than last time = the result will be A +; so on.
But in the face of a new conflict situation, that same work team will become (for a short time or until they align functions or manage their synergy) a work group, which to become a work team again will require TIME and management from the leader.
Furthermore, what would happen if one of the members no longer continues for “x” reasons, the new replacement will require TIME to adapt and his adaptation will influence the results and generate a directly proportional relationship between the adaptability time of the new collaborator and the time of obtaining results from the team in a situation that has already been experienced and this is complicated if the problems are new to everyone.
Of course, they are understanding, the time to go from working in a group to working in a team will depend in this case on two more variables, the adaptation or learning level of the new member and the difficulty in the situation to be solved.
In addition, for a person to be willing to work as a team, he must want it and know that by himself (there are exceptions) he will not be able to achieve his goals, so the team leader must be an excellent negotiator and detect what the motivations are. of each member and satisfy them with the results they achieve together.
And before each situation overcome, the leader must land concepts and meet with his subordinates to make them think through open questions, about the things they learned from this problem and how it would be the best way to solve it in the near future.
Finally, what happens with employees who do not work as a team, do they have to be fired? A few moments ago we commented that work teams are different in their operation between the areas of sales, production, administration, research & development, and so on.
That is why I will take a case to exemplify what I will maintain: Some years ago I worked in an insurance company in the area of recruitment and training of human resources, the best life insurance salesperson during the last three years was a person who could not work As a team, she worked alone when making her calls, appointments, interviews and closings, it was sudden and her production exceeded in some cases the goal of “teams” of work.
What am I trying to say with this, not all people are trained to work in a team, however the result of their work is adequate and they produce more working alone, so it must be taken into account that a left-handed child cannot and should not be done write with your right hand, this applies analogously to collaborators who do their production without working as a team, it benefits the company from an economic point of view and above all have an adequate interpersonal relationship with their colleagues. However, this profile occurs more in sales or research & development, but in the production and administrative areas it is difficult to achieve it.
Now, dear reader, you can, with all the elements of judgment expressed in this article, give an answer to the question in the title.
Bibliography
- Buscaglia, L (1995) the art of being fully human. Buenos Aires. Emecé Editores. 140 pp. Campoverde ayres J. (1996) vision of a leader. Lima Ed. Support 356 pp. Furnham, Adrian. Organizational Psychology: The Behavior of the individual in organizations. Oxford university Press. Mexico, 2001Hammer, M and shampoo J (1998) how to improve your team. Bogotá Ed. Macchi 270 pp Rodríguez, José M. The human factor in the company. Editions. University of Navarra, Navarra 1995.Peters, TJ. And RH waterman Jf. (1998) in search of excellence. Bogota Ed. Norma. 340 pp
