Is Teamwork Important at Your Place of Business?

High-Performance teamwork is more than a group of people working together to accomplish a common task. They have a shared vision and purpose that inspires their performance. They feel accountable for their work, solve problems, make decisions and fully invest themselves in the organization. For a team to achieve High-Performance, they must be allowed the time to set their purpose, operating norms, characteristics and desired performance results.

High-Performance teams have been defined as self-managing, multi-functional groups of people who are organized around a whole process and empowered with full responsibility for their success. To achieve High-Performance teamwork, certain elements must be present.

In High-Performance teams, these areas are not independent. They all impact each other and the outcomes expected of the team. However, there is a sequence that must drive their development. The charter must be clear before a team can be designed and a team must be designed well to reduce relationship problems.

Once the team's charter, design, and relationship are established and agreed upon, the team will show the following characteristics:

• A shared mission
• Autonomy and authority
• Interdependence and shared leadership
• Broadly defined jobs
• Meaningful participation in decisions
• Higher performance

In a teamwork environment, the group is enabled to become self-governing with facilitative guidance. This is possible because it is organized around core processes and employees possess multiple skills, are governed by principles and view each other as partners. They also demonstrate an atmosphere of shared leadership and can make decisions.

High-Performance leaders create teamwork by helping them understand their charter, their design, and their relationship. Empowering leaders have a vision and the ability to develop and share it with the entire team. They are driven by a strong motivation and passion for this shared vision. Additionally, such leaders can establish high levels of rapport and trust among team members. They avoid controlling and coercing team members. Rather, they inspire and induce a high degree of enthusiasm from team members toward meeting the agreed-upon goals.

If you agree with the statement, “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” then you understand the importance of teamwork chain and its internal interdependency. In business, team of people represents the chain, and the two powerful words to describe the expectations of this chain are integrity and trust.

Integrity and trust are cultivated, where fairness in the workplace is the norm. The best way to make sure all processes are fair, and employees feel that there is justice in the workplace, is to keep the communication channels open. Get regular feedback from your coworkers, and hear them out when they say that they are not being treated fairly. Act on these feelings and make processes and decisions more transparent. This will not only ensure fairness, but will create incentives and motivation to enhance productivity and creativity.

However, to get to this point, leaders and team members must work through certain processes. The processes that go into building teamwork includes:

• Understanding how teams work
• Learning effective meeting management skills
• Delegating
• Clarifying team members' roles and responsibilities.
• A system for measuring performance, setting goals and tracking progress
• Spearheading a free office politics culture

When a team has successfully moved from high potential to high performance, three results are visible. They can:

• Raise their goals to meet new business demands
• Successfully identify and eliminate the most threatening problems and obstacles
• Effectively develop and implement action plans to reach established goals

In summary, a proactive focus on teamwork is an organizational imperative, not just something given lip service at the annual company event. When responsibly developed in each department, and organization-wide, teamwork can be the critical factor that assures targets are reached, initiatives are well implemented, and increased competitiveness is achieved. When high levels of teamwork are in place, a range of measurable factors will all trend positively, from lower employee turnover and stress-related absences to departmental improvements and efficiencies and higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Your company will be a happier place to work too.