Teamwork Is Achieved With Same Drive, Common Cause And Unity.

Team work is very important for any organization keen on succeeding and winning. Most companies will have team work on their list of values. This means that it is a very important part of any success and hence having the best team is akin to having a level ground. Chances of winning a medal are very high.

As a matter of fact, an organization must first understand where they want to be. The vision in other words. Then they need a stipulation on how to get there. This is the mission and within it, is the strategic plan. It is important to understand where you have come from, where you are at present and where you want to be in the future. Only then can you know how to go about your business. Sometimes it needs proper thinking and wisdom to figure things out.

Having the same drive is the first component of a successful team. Drive is a self-motivation coupled with ambition. If a team lacks self-motivation and ambition, then there is a very great danger. This aspect comes to play when you find that part of the group lacks the aspect of long term thinking and is only interested in the short term gains. It often happens when any of the team members does not really understand what the long term goals and objectives of an organizations are.

Such kind of individuals end up becoming the disrupters as Jack welch calls them in his book, Winning. This are the individuals with a thick skin who don’t seem to dissipate the positive energy and motivation as the rest of the team. Understanding who your disrupters are is the first important thing which can help you to carefully lead them over time to understand the road plan of the organization.

A few weeks ago I downloaded a YouTube clip from Perfomia which outlines the different types of team players. The disrupters are called Potential Trouble Source (PTS) and at worst, Suppressive people (SP). Even though the team has the performer, and perhaps the highly effective doer, the PTS and SP can easily weaken the team. It is only a matter of time before they influence the less effective doer off track and that is very dangerous.

For such a people, Jack Welch, former CEO of GE advices that you demand change of them and if they fail to do so, then get them out of the way for the people trying to do their jobs. They are poison. From today going forward, it is important to understand the different people in your team and where they fall. Only then can you know how to handle them and what measures to take to ensure they don’t become a deadly poison to the organization.

Having a team driven by the same core ideology and values is a great start too. You don’t need a lot of science to get to know this of people. Motivation alone can clearly tell you where an individual lies. I mean what makes the individual tick, do they identify themselves with the core ideology and values of the organization or do they compare themselves more with other non-organizational things.

The biggest challenge here is perhaps the equity theory that has been elaborated well in the book Management basics by Susan Quinn, associate professor at Bissett School of business. The equity theory arises where people compare their own input to their own perceived reward, then people compare their input and perceived reward to one another’s perceived inequity.

This kind of thinking greatly affects the motivation of the team. It emanates from team members themselves. It then leads to expectancy theory in which people will increase their performance contingent on a reward for that. At this stage, the favored ones will only be the lot that engages as owners, those who have intrinsic motivation as opposed to extrinsic motivation.

Remember in these theories we are dealing with perception which is very hard to perceive of a team member. It is very hard to know how a team member perceives equity for that matter or even fairness. And it varies from one team member to another, which means the wrong perception can slowly infect even the right perception and this leads to a demotivated team.

Core ideology as defined in the book Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jeremy Porras is the enduring character of an organization—its self-identity that remains consistent through time and transcends product/market life cycles, technological breakthroughs, management fads, and individual leaders.

They further define core values as the organization’s essential and enduring tenets—a small set of timeless guiding principles that require no external justification; they have intrinsic value and importance to those inside the organization. It is the understanding of these core ideology and values that brings about the common cause aspect. The understanding of the enterprise’s enduring character and the culture behind it is what breeds the unity in any team.

Perhaps the last important thing that promotes teamwork is the aspect of team members understanding each other and cultivating an environment of trust. When individuals understand each other, it becomes important to in that they get to know how to respect, treat and work together with each other. This enables the drawing of boundaries regarding execution of their work and even privacy. The worst thing is to do a thing that threatens the sobriety of a team member which often breeds animosity.

Let every team member understand their roles and mandate and execute them as such. This will mean the simplest of respect and it is better seen and felt than said. When there is an intra-motivation, there is often no need to stress on this because the energy should flow freely from inside of them.

We can all make great team members when we grasp the basics of what makes great teams. So much said of an individual trying to understand teamwork breeding, management and culture development. We can only hope we will make great team members and in turn build great teams.

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