Take a look at every Business guide that deals with Sales Management, Leadership or Strategy, and you’ll discover numerous mentions of how essential teamwork is and building teams. Although they are laudable for the direction of leaders and managers to create, nurture, and promote a ‘team culture’ or a shared ethics’ within groups, many of them don’t work. It’s a sad fact that many “teams” do not even exist as teams. Many do not exist outside the imagination (or most often just dreaming) that of the manager.
We’ve seen a lot of instances where a leader requested support for their “team” only to discover that there was no team. We were dealing with a group of people with different backgrounds whose only shared commonality was the fact that they had to be in one physical location for 35 hours each week. In every other way and according to any other measure, these are not groups, despite the fact that the leader believed and wished that they were.
What are the steps one can follow to build teams? If taking groups of disparate individuals and forming unitary units is an ideal scenario (and that is), What can we do to build teams and create a and common ethos? If all the books tell us to build teams, then what in practice can we do to implement it? Here is a completely not definitive list of the things that leaders must consider in order to accomplish their goals.
1. Identity
Is the team you’re considering joining possess a clear, clear, and convincing reason for being? Are they aware of what their goal is and the reason for it, and why it’s to a certain extent worth it?
2. Roles
Does every member of the team know and accept their roles? Remember that amazing (and likely to be completely fake) tale about the man who was the cleaner at NASA who was asked what he worked for, replied: “I’m helping make a person go to the moon.” Do you understand the reason they’re there? Are they aware of the reason why other members are also there? Do they understand the reasons they are important? Why are their colleagues important? Without a common and compelling conviction, no team. It’s just the word “group” (and groups are simple).
3. Politics
If a person isn’t able to come up with any sense of direction, they’ll try to gain the upper hand. In Roman times, this was careful plotting, the spread of rumors, the solicitation of support, and finally, ultimately, the (often bloody) overthrow of the ruler. In spite of the modernity of our 21st century and with our Apple Mac Powerbooks and Cafe-Latte tradition, we haven’t changed from this mindset in the present. If people are employed in pursuit of noble and/or worthy objectives, they don’t have the time nor the desire to plot and stab one other in the back. Corporate Politics, through its very existence, is the ultimate test of teamwork. If you are involved in political views, you don’t have any team.
4. What is the purpose of your team?
Does it have a clearly defined purpose? A single, noble and significant goal? The concept of the “Big hairy, audacious Goal can be applied to this situation. Don’t waste time forming teams for small or unimportant jobs – it squanders the whole process. Create a plan, then sell it to others. And the moment (and just when) you’ve got a bunch of people who have similar but mostly non-repeated experiences and skills that are united around this worthy, common cause, then you truly belong to an organization.
