Teamwork Training

team performance Teamwork Training Why is teamwork training vital?

Because no matter how social you are, or how professional you are, or how expert in your field, good teamwork is fraught with difficulty. An expert manager must be social, professional, and expert.

A team brings greater leverage, but on the flip side, problems in a team can have a compounding effect on poor performance for each individual team member. And managing a team comes with a web of factors to untangle and control. So just…

What are the constraints of teamwork?

Differences in ideas, skills, motivations, even beliefs can constrain a team’s performance. A lack of resources and tools such as communication systems can slow a team down. Insufficient planning from a lack of open discussion can lead to conflicts and misunderstandings.

In fact, through primary research as well as my own experience over a decade of work in companies both large and small, I discovered a number of fundamental causes of poor teamwork.

They can be grouped under 4 categories:

Problems caused by upper management
Problems caused by team managers
Problems caused in team cohesion
Problems with individual team members

Problems, problems, problems. Upper management wants to have it’s say, and often causes disruption for teamwork. Team managers themselves often lack the experience of successfully guiding team collaboration and performance. Thus teams do not have the cohesion of a purposefully aligned team, and there may even be specific problems with individual members of the team such as resistance to change, incompentence, or just plain old chronic laziness.

Solutions for Teamwork Training

What kind of teamwork training is best partly depends on the situation and the team, but it’s easy enough to appreciate that the solution to teamwork training can be described with 3 components: Outcome, Constraints and Processes.

Outcome means the identification of what you want to achieve via the team. Both the team’s grand purpose or objective, as well as it’s collaborative projects which lead towards that overall desired outcome.
Constraints management means knowing where you are and what’s in the way of getting to where you want.
Operations are the ways and means (the ‘how to’) for achieving the identified outcome through projects and process by eliminating the constraints.

That might seem somewhat circular, and it is. That’s why it is an undeniably clear and precise protocol on which to base teamwork training for success. It’s easy to see how clarity of outcomes, managing constraints, and managing the throughput of activities will facilitate greater cohesion within the team.