Teamwork has come up in almost every work meeting over the last decade. It is often perceived as overrated, not because the concept of teamwork is a bad thing, but because people tend to enforce it in ineffective places. Building a successful team means diligently identifying its team members and setting appropriate goals. Each team must have a clearly defined concept of what its membership entails. There has to be a clear-cut way to decide who can be a member. At the same time, we have to appease the frustration and anxiety associated with setting said goals.
To correctly grasp the concept of a team, one has to realize the difference between a team and a group. Group and team processes are different and have often been confused in recent years.
Professional literature perceives a team in a work environment as a very precisely defined type of workgroup with clearly defined rules of cooperation.
Failure to understand the unique differences of a team tends to be the source of misunderstandings in the work of many workgroups. A prerequisite for the existence of a team is the assignment of a mutual, clearly defined task or a project that the team members accept as their own. The chosen task for each team should be appropriate according to their respective sizes. A team should have only enough members to get to know each other personally and communicate directly. Around three to eight members are considered optimal. The team should consist of interested and functionally linked people.
Team norms tend to be task-oriented, rewarding those activities and practices that help efficient and thorough work and include penalties for those that reduce efficiency or quality. The essence of a team beckons the involvement of people with different skill sets. It aims to coordinate their activities to maximalise the efficiency of task completion. Effective communication is the key for team members must understand fully what each contributes to the team’s work.
A capable team leader should ensure that each team member knows their purpose, what to work on, how to achieve desired goals, and why. He must let them tackle their responsibilities on their own, however.
Only hat way can he tap into all the intelligence and ideas of his members – all the human resources, instead of expecting people to behave like robots.
The ability of people to team up and work together is something normal that has existed since prehistoric times. Working in the workplace and cooperating with others is nothing revolutionary or revelatory. It is a critical skill that we use to channel the potential of our co-workers.