How can teamwork help organization succeed

Over the course of interviewing over leaders for Corner Office , I asked them all about the art of fostering a strong sense of teamwork. Their insights can help you lay the groundwork for a highly productive team that can communicate, cooperate and innovate in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect. Hiring the right people is the most important part of building a strong team, of course, and delegating to give people more autonomy is a powerful motivator.

But managing a team is not that simple. Leaders have to play a far more hands-on role to make sure the group works well together and remains focused on the right priorities. There are six main drivers for creating a strong culture of teamwork — the things that, if done well, have an outsize impact. And the insights are applicable to any team or organization, from five people to , Another meeting-filled day?

Meetings don't have to feel like time-sucks. With these tips and strategies, they can be efficient and productive. And that may sound simple, but it is often one of the greatest challenges that teams, divisions and companies face. What does success look like? If you were to set up a scoreboard to track success over time, what would it measure? The trouble often starts when leaders start listing five or seven or 11 priorities. Those priorities have to be lined up as carefully as the trajectory of a rocket launch, because even the slightest miscalculation can take a team off-course over time.

Another benefit of having a simple plan is that it creates a shared goal that will offset the tendency of people to identify themselves as part of smaller groups.

Think of a football team, for example. In the absence of that simple, shared scoreboard, people will make up their own ways to measure their success, Mr. Nash added. Once you have a simple plan, you have to keep reminding your team of the priorities, even if it can feel repetitive. People often have to hear something a few times before they truly remember it. Marc Cenedella , chief executive of TheLadders.

There are certain behaviors that are encouraged and discouraged — like rules of the road — for how everyone is going to try to get along and spend their time. Pull together a group of people to work on any project, and they will develop a culture of their own, and it will be as unique as the people in the group. As a leader, you can take a laissez-faire approach and hope the team meshes well over time.

Or you can look for opportunities to set some shared guidelines for how people will work together. There are no hard and fast rules for developing the cultural values of a team. In some cases, the founder of a company will issue them to employees. In others, top executives will turn the exercise over to employees to make it a bottom-up effort. The most important thing is for the team or company to live by their stated values, rather than just going through the motions of the exercise, with people earning promotions even though their behavior runs directly counter to the stated rules of the road.

There are many benefits of teamwork , most notably, an increase in motivation from your employees. A recent study by Stanford University showed that when people are treated as partners or team members — even when physically apart — their motivation increases. Motivation from your employees means more success for your company. Developing an effective team in your organisation can seem like a simple and straightforward task, however it can be difficult to execute and put into practice.

Members of your organisation want to be able to believe in the process and realise the wonderful outcomes that come from working together as opposed to individually; so it is up to the manager to ensure that enthusiasm is garnered and nourished. The most important building block to develop and effective team is communication, so it is imperative to develop the necessary skills to communicate effectively with each other.

You want your employees to feel like they can put forth their ideas and express their feelings in an open environment, but you also need them to be keen listeners who are prepared to listen to the views of others. It can be easy for a team to fall apart quickly if its members favour their own personal goals over that of the team. To keep the teamwork fire going, you need to establish regular and open lines of communication and monitor how the group interacts. Learning to communicate effectively is not a simple one step process and requires work from all sides.

It is a great idea to have weekly meetings in which the manager is present in order to see how the team interacts with each and offer feedback on their achievements, as well as how the team meetings are running. An effective team is one that has cohesion, to do this your team members need to exhibit the following skills:.

Do you think the teams in your organisation are working efficiently and cohesively? Describes the process of team development and affirms the value of teams in ensuring a competitive edge for organizations against their competitors.

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