How Important is Teamwork?

We do not oper­ate inde­pen­dently in the work­place. We need to social­ize and work as a com­bined entity in the work­place. We require inputs and feed­backs from co-workers. We depend on each other’s exper­tise to com­plete tasks. We form teams to get assign­ments going. Team­work is essen­tial and every­where. Team­work allows us to syn­er­gise. That is to cre­ate out­put far greater than the sum of all. There is a com­mon say­ing about syn­ergy, 1 + 1 = 3 (instead of the math­e­mat­i­cal 2). Team­work is ben­e­fi­cial for every­one as it com­pli­ments each other’s weak­nesses or lever­age on each other’s strengths. You may argue that you can do it on your own. But wait, if you can focus on doing some­thing else that you are more famil­iar and capa­ble of, and allow another per­son take charge of what you are doing that is of a com­mon objec­tive, don’t you think you can achieve your objec­tive at a faster pace?

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.

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