Teamwork, a common buzzword, but one that is so essential to life. The old acronym Together Everyone Achieves More is so true. As they say, working as a team means that you get better results than the total of everyone’s results if they work individually – and you have more fun!!
If you work together as a team, you can play to everyone’s strengths which is more productive, and you can ensure that the knowledge and expertise that you have is passed on to others.
If you look at the example of sports teams, some are a collection of talented individuals who all want the glory and don’t work together as a team, while others recognise their strengths and shortcomings, know that they need each other and play their sport very effectively – and are much more pleasing on the eye to watch. It’s no good a football team being full of goalkeepers, or strikers – you need defenders, full backs, wingers and midfield players as well.
In your organisation you will have different types of people. You may have someone who is a great ideas person, thinking of the next new project, venture, product, but who is hopeless at making it work. You may have someone who can take that idea and plan what you need to do to make it work, someone who will look at the big picture, strategic plan for the future and someone who pays close attention to detail. There will be someone who can start a project off – and someone else who will complete it, someone who is good dealing with people and someone else who is happy to be sat in front of a screen all day.
Hopefully, it will be fairly obvious to you where your people’s strengths lie. If not, there are various questionnaires that you could ask them to complete to help – Myers Briggs is the most well known, but the Strengths Finder tool from Marcus Buckingham, and his new Standout are also useful for this. People are far happier if they are playing to their strengths – and being stretched in those areas, than if they have to play to the weaker areas.
Spend some time watching and thinking about the individuals that are in your team. What are they best at? Have you got a good mix? Is there a particular area that you are missing? Work hard at moulding these people into a strong team, giving recognition to all of them for what they do well.
Teamwork is so important – and it also makes us feel good knowing that where we are weak, there is someone next to us who can fill that gap and continue with the good work.
Build a good strong team – it really does give you an advantage.