Teamwork compliments our individual weakness. Remember about the Me factor and the personal awareness quadrants? We know the limits of our abilities and we want to expand our abilities. The simple solution, we tap on other’s expertise. Tap meaning leveraging if were to put it in a more decent tone. And leveraging each other’s expertise is teamwork. Given a task that you find you are unable to deliver, you gather co-workers to complement your weakness with their strengths. But before you can even gather the right co-workers, you must know who complements you. And this knowledge is within your awareness of the You factor. With a person that complements your weakness with his strength, you achieve productivity by creating a well-balanced team.

Teamwork requires respect and compromise of the team members. Let’s admit it, neither you and I are perfect. Nobody is. And because we are imperfect, we depend on each other. To have teamwork, the team members must be willing to accept the differences. Differences like working style, habits and mental model. For example, your team member may be meticulous in handling report and takes a long time to proof read it before the management review. On the other hand, you feel that the report is sufficiently fine and ready for management’s review. Here there is a misalignment of work styles. You want it fast to be delivered to the management while he wants it slow in ensuring no errors are made. You’ll get frustrated if you do not respect and compromise his working style. Look from another angle. He may be slow in delivering but he does ensure everything is fine and uncovering the mistakes you made.

There are two types of teamwork: power-packed team and balanced team. The power-packed team may consist of team members that possess abilities of the same skill set. It can be described like doubled loaded cannon with enhanced rapid fire. Scientists and engineers are good examples of power-packed teams. The disadvantage of this team is that they are a grouping of the same type of people which may tend to miss out common things together. The balanced team as the name suggest is a combination of team member that complement each other. The benefit of such teams is that they can leverage on one another’s abilities. The disadvantage is that they may not have direct boost on a specified ability.

Teamwork is everywhere and essential in productivity. An individual may achieve this far, but with a team effort, the individual can achieve even further. Teamwork is about leveraging on each other’s best. Before you can leverage another person, you need to respect and compromise the differences that you and he may have. With understanding of your team members, we are certain that you can deliver higher productivity than what you can expect of yourself.