Syed Umar Ahmed

The Need for Implementing Teamwork Within the Modern Organizations Management Summary This article attempts to interpret the essence of groups and teams, by taking into consideration their existing dissimilarities. This is succeeded by a dialogue concerning the significance of implementing teamwork within the present-day organizations. Thereafter, Tuckman (1965) ‘Model of Group Development’ is further considered in discussing the situations where collective team effort is deemed essential, which is then followed by a dialogue pertaining to group procedures, that cause profitless teamwork.   Introduction We can define a team as ‘a small-scale faction comprising of people possessing appreciative abilities and skills whilst committing themselves towards achieving a mutual approach and objective while holding themselves answerable to their actions'.  The most suitable size of such team could be somewhere between 7 to 12 people, whereas there is always a variation in the group size. Numerous and manifold viewpoints are conveyed, and the irrevocable conclusion is made by an inferred agreement or by a voting process.  A group may be explained as ‘one small division comprising of people possessing appreciative abilities and skills whilst committing themselves towards achieving a mutual approach and objective while holding them answerable to the leader’. Every single team member does have distinctive abilities, and each one of them could productively work together towards their mutual objective accomplishment. Most often, the teams are assignment oriented, while the groups could be established impulsively.  The team captaincy is comprehensively shared due to the presence of a small number of members in each team compared to that number that could likely formulate a group. Basically, mutual interest purposes are needed by the teams, while the groups don’t require it. Leadership gets equally shared and rotated when we speak about a well-organized small team.  Although, a group’s development is also considered to be officially planned where the management formulates it considering the basics of organizational composition, departments or divisions might get included in the formulation of groups, where corresponding actions seem to be gathered altogether.    Such a group is usually formulated in order to attain certain organizational objectives that pertain to the compatibility of activities concerned to work. Official groups normally tend to be enduring, irrespective of the fact that memberships are likely to be revised.  Casual groupings are more concentrated on personal relationships and customary beliefs, as compared to distinct or defined role relationships. Such type of group performs more in an attempt to please both the social demands and psychological demands, than the defined organizational objectives.  Defining Groups and Teams A description of team may be ‘the people comprising the team share common goals and objectives and work together for its accomplishment’. We may define team as “Classification of people linked to an organization, executing tasks that lead towards organizational aims accomplishment". They have same mutual work goals. They possess the requisite resources, autonomy and authority in order to accomplish those objectives”. The main dissimilarity between a team and a group lies in the fact that team members “allocate a common same goal to one another, with mutual consent, and pursue collaboratively for its accomplishment. Furthermore, they may fail or succeed as a whole only, as they work as a team collectively; these team members also share the costs as well as advantages of both the failures and successes. Contrary to that, members of one certain group may allocate to each other, some common features, where each one does have its own independent objectives.  Importance of Teamwork In present-day organizations, “those who were previously contenders have now become associates, those who were once strangers, have now become stakeholders, those who were once clear-cut boundaries have now become indistinct fences” The value of collaboration has now been realized by the organizations from all perspectives. One can link the team work to subtle financial benefits, increased employee satisfaction, lower absenteeism as well greater outputs. It has been proved as well, that it leads to reduced demanding work, improved working relationships and ultimately reduced alienation.  Outline Tuckman’s stages in team development Tuckman’s representation concentrates on the happenings occurring within team, it is significant here to debate about the role of a leader during such phases. The leadership ‘One-size-fits-all’ couldn’t become much effective in leading the groups via these stages efficaciously. We are going to inspect the 4 perfect characters of leaders that they should adapt during the progression of such individual phases.  Forming = the Director Through this particular phase, the group achieves much significance, and to perform this efficaciously, someone needs to be there who acts as an authoritative being.  The leader must possess the attributes of being directive, keeping everyone on target and creating structured meetings to hone in on the group’s objectives. Leader, who is quite a bit, an authoritative officer during this phase, who is instructing his members of the team to perform the required tasks and keeping an eye to the ongoing progress of the tasks being carried out. During this phase, the commanding officer should be questioning herself about the appropriate placement of the group within the organization, and also finding out what the main aims of group truly are. Furthermore, she should also question herself on making the mission of the team captivating enough so that it guarantees more buy-in by the group members. Also, she must be utilizing that time to noticing the preferences and strengths of their members of the team, in respect of their communication styles and skill sets.   Storming = the Coach Being a restless phase with intensified emotions, this specific spell needs a commanding officer, to govern the mayhem whilst giving a compassionate ear to her members of the team. It is vital to hearing the input of the people at this phase, even if the recommendations couldn’t be included into group’s scheme, being perceived goes an extended way towards developing good will. Being a coach, it is also vital to educate your group members about the best possible ways of functioning as a team collaboratively, whilst being supportive and encouraging at the same time. Whilst being in a storming phase of her team, a leader should ensure propagation of well-defined purpose amongst all the members of the group. In addition to that, she should provide the assurance of representing each adequate skill sets, in order to meet team’s desired collaborative objective. Similarly, she should maintain such an environment where each team member feels at home as he is given a free space to express their concerns and emotions openly. She should also plan to devise appropriate means of bringing people closer to each other, thereby harmonizing their collaborative work methodologies, whilst collecting deeper insights out of the team members, on the most adequate ways of accomplishment of their objectives. Maintaining authority is essential, till the time the group is progressing and has possessed autonomy to a considerable extent.  Norming = the Collaborator During this stage, where the solidification of the group is taking place, it is now a suitable time for the leader to let go of control a bit & start focusing on entrusting responsibilities. As the work gets smoother running, a few team members feel themselves to be ready to take more challenging assignments. During this phase, a leader usually concentrates more on developing confidence of her team members, whilst daring the thinking of the team to evade “group think.” and self-regard.  In-team independence propagates during this phase, as self-assurance among the members in their abilities and their roles is elevated. A concerted commanding officer makes her team members involved in sophisticated issues pertaining to leadership levels, such as high-level decisions, conflict resolution and problem-solving.  During this phase, a concerted commanding officer, should question herself about the progress of Norming Process, ‘Do there exist agreed upon and established methodologies for better communication’? Does there exist a feedback system, which assists in making the team enthusiastic, organized and goal oriented? Do the people feel purposeful and aligned?  Are people feeling aligned and purposeful? Tackling these mentioned questions, greatly benefit a leader in rightly guiding her team into the succeeding group development stage.  Performing = the Visionary During this phase, team is greatly progressing and the respective members seem to be well organized having possessed a substantial amount of independence. Ultimately, this results in yet another modification in management pattern, to outward focus directly from the inward focus. There arises a requirement of a resourceful being, which is aware of outside trends, competition alongside market drivers.  In addition to this, a commanding officer in this stage needs enhancing leadership attribute as a whole within team members in an attempt to organize future plans. For the purpose of attaining enhanced team performance and focusing on persistent growth and improvement, so as to maintain the high-performance graph of the team and ensuring that all individuals have developed the desire for success.  During this premier phase, a leader should be quite concerned about the member satisfaction and her team effectiveness. Emphasis should be laid upon flexibility in anticipation of future events that may change a team’s methods or goals as well as generating new ideas. At this point of time, identity of the team should well be in place, and the leader should be assessing the ideas of properly aligning them with the future vision. Lastly, performance indicators and systematic feedback data analysis shall be implemented in order to continually improve the approach of the team and also to maintain optimization.  Managerial decision making to Group Decision making The process of decision making by the managers mainly depends upon the managers’ personality traits. The way a manager behaves, is dependent upon his personality traits. The personality traits of a manager greatly influence the rate of acceptability of managerial decisions. The prior researches pertaining to the personality traits have deduced the fact that ‘personality actually concerns to multiple types of attributes employed for describing behavior of an individual.  The famous attributes employed for describing personality are aggressive, loyal, timid, submissive and lazy etc. When these attributes displayed in a number of different situations, they are then referred to as ‘the personality traits’. The personality traits need to receive highest priority in organizational civilization, since it is greatly linked to the organization’s decision-making phase.  Recognition of personality traits has gained much popularity, during the employee selection at the recruitment stage and during the phase of assigning respective jobs.  The decisions made by the managers depend upon the manager’s personality traits. People are different in thinking from others; they have their distinct viewpoints whilst solving any specific issues.  The perception power and thinking pattern differs widely among different people. Personality traits also impacts managerial decisions to a greater extent. The personality attributes of the employees is also much essential to consider while taking different decisions by the managers. Various organizations offer multiple types of jobs, where each job requires distinct personality traits of employees for its productive execution.  The different characteristics of employee’s personality is taken into consideration by the managers whilst assigning different types of jobs to them, hence considering the personality traits by the managers while assigning jobs to employees is deemed essential.  Group decision making One of the significant organizational activity is the ‘decision making process’. Usually, managers are held accountable for decision taking pertaining to various different tasks within employee management and the business.  Presently, many business organizations have incorporated a diversified work force. The diverse work force team members may have varied viewpoints that may usually end up in conflicts whilst decision process is in progress.  Due to this very fact, group discussions have attained a significant importance during the decision-making phase. During the decision-making phase, group discussions serve to be a significant tool since it may generate a lot of innovative thoughts conveyed by every single team member. Similarly, decision taking is a prolonged process that causes considerable delay to a specific activity.  The succeeding discussion will thus greatly assist in comprehending various types of benefits and drawbacks of the process of ‘Group Decision Making’. Information sharing and synergy are the core benefits of the ‘Group Decision Making’ phase. ‘The sum of the partial information collected from different team members is not enough for analyzing the whole situation’, is defined to be as Synergy.  Group discussions facilitate the collective decision taking aspect. The judgement of any individual manager of the organization doesn’t have much influence as compared to the judgement of a group decision making process. Asking different questions from members of the team and gathering answers collectively from them, result in the generation of more comprehensive suggestions that are helpful in resolution of specific problems as compared to decision making process by the managers.    Sharing of information is yet another significant benefit of these group discussions and decision-making phases. The ideas gathered collectively are employed for recognizing the most productive one specific to a certain condition. Sharing of Information also enhances the understanding ability and the ability to elucidate the problems, in order to take appropriate decisions.   The other significant benefit of group decision phase is motivation of the employee. Motivation factor develops within each employee thereby enhancing their professional skills at the same time.  Facilitation of Teamwork at Workplace The team efforts usually produce much better results as compared to single individual’s efforts.  “Teams are generally more productive and their work can lead to the creation of valuable new products”, a conclusion drawn by Leslie Palich of Pepperdine University. Nonetheless, difficulties may also arise within the groups: vague objectives, disagreement and infighting about the project’s direction, are some of the few problems that may result in development of dispute even among most productive teams. The teamwork could be improved in a number of ways mentioned as under:  Implement Recognition Programs Encouraging excellent teamwork is achieved by acknowledgement of group’s good performances. Initiation of incentives to appreciate good team work, in the form of praising and issuance of appreciation tokens bearing organization’s name. The author of the book “Advanced Project Management,”, named as Alan Orr, had recommended encouraging team for its work by adequately publicizing the team work. Such practice would definitely be beneficial to induce encouragement among the team members, thereby encouraging a more collaborative approach in performing tasks as well as boosting the job value too.   Encourage Social Activities When the workers are fairly acquainted to each other, it causes enhancement in the team work, such a sense of fellowship is developed by devising team activities and events. Such events may be casual, like a get together at the nearby café, or team development event may become more of an elaborated event, if it happens at some resort over the weekend.  Outline Clear Roles Enhance teamwork strategies by clearly defining duty of respective members. Before the commencement of any given assignment, one must sit together with team members to gauge their respective skill sets and guiding them. Outlining the duties as per each member’s capabilities is essential. Communicate with members and discuss the practicability of assigned duties as well, which would alleviate some stress from the workers minds as they might be stressed out thinking about unrealistic expectations.  Identify Existing Problems Seek for feedback from the group members, in an attempt to gauge conflict sources. Example of those issues may include, 1 member of the group being detached, conflict over how best to proceed on the project, personality clashes and inability to meet deadlines.  Although, groups may work to solve the issues by themselves, such methodology might not be the best. Author of the book “Project Team Dynamics,” named as Lisa DiTullio, had suggested that the issues should be tackled with, the moment of their eruption. Group members should be motivated enough that they openly discuss the problems without having any fear whatsoever.  Mediate Disputes Detailed guidance need to be presented, mentioning the ways to alleviate distress situations among members, this in turn enhances teamwork by authorizing the members to resolve the matters that may occur, in an efficacious manner. Start by encouraging members to directly interact with that person who is responsible in spreading negative effect.  Group should be encouraged, to furnish proper documentation pertaining to any specific problem, with the help of which, members should be in a position to convey their guiding suggestion for the improvement of the situation. Rather than supporting a blame culture, promote a solution oriented and a proactive attitude approach. For instance, if a member is continuously failing to deliver his work timely, in a specific project, he should be encouraged by allowing him to supply the work that he has completed so far  Manager Do to Promote Good Teamwork Efficient teamwork in a workplace could result in a fulfilled and loyal workforce, higher morale and much increased productivity. Good teamwork among the staff members could well be promoted by the managers, when they attempt to set specific objectives, identify strengths, and define measurable outcomes and objectives.  They may also play pivotal role in rewarding team and individual successes, providing feedback as well as overseeing progress. Considering the complexity of the business, several managers could be hired, or alternatively you could take the charge of supervising the team.  Get to Know Employees That manager who is quite familiar about the key abilities of the employees could easily develop such teams that guarantee efficient outcomes. Understand the professional attributes of the employees, and formulate work groups, where there exists a culture of complementing each other. Appropriate tasks need to be assigned and defining roles of leadership should be given top priority.  Oversee Project Planning and Implementation The best results from teams could be taken, in the event where there exist clearly defined goals, deadlines and strategies. Team members should be considered while planning different sessions, in order to ensure harmonization within the group, and there should be a common belief that goals can be well achieved by collaborative efforts. Ensure that all workers are complying to all defined parameters, pertaining to handling of given assignments, and addressing of certain disputes that may arise during the course of event. Adequate pre planning before commencement of a project, more likely you get the successful results.    Create Open Communication Channels Teamwork could be hindered in an event where communication ceases to exist between employees and their manager or between the members of the team. Regular meetings should be held and request for progress updates and reports, in order to ensure smooth running functioning of every individuals’ assigned tasks. Problems need not be suppurated; rather the problems need to be addressed properly by including the whole team, so as to find out the appropriate solution to the problem.    Be Fair Ensuring that the team members have impartial workloads, according to their professional and personal capabilities. Burdening an employee could make him stressed out which may ultimately lead to disputes within the team. Treat every employee justly. If one employee is being provided with extended deadlines or being given allowance, while the others don’t get that, such situation could lead to bitterness.  Be Available If one team member is suffering from a challenging scenario, or he seems to be detached from the group, this specific scenario is difficult in understanding that particular employee’s problems. Bring the employees in the comfort zone so that they can freely discuss their concerns and their issues, also assist those employees by giving them such solutions that will lead to their problem resolution.    Recognize Efforts The efforts and contribution of every single member of the team need to be acknowledged. Outstanding performers need to be distinctly mentioned to praise them for their excellent efforts, whilst maintaining the belief that the success has been achieved as a result of combined team efforts. This practice not only acknowledges the best team member for his commendable efforts, yet it also paves a way to future successes for the team members.  Conclusion During the phase of guiding a team in its developmental phase, is certainly a challenging task, but by the adaptation of one’s own distinctive style of leadership, it can become possible to have the process expedited. Moreover, you could extract much more from your team while maintaining an elevated level of effectiveness and morale. Last but not the least, the flexibility and internal drive that allows the group to thrive, are prominent aspects that could formulate such a team which could easily combat all adverse circumstances. The process of ‘Group Decision Making is useful in corporate culture domain in the today’s era. Presently, business firms have taken the extent of superior decision taking by means of these group decision methods. It holds true, that the process of group decision making can effectively generate more productive strategies and ideas, but it also holds true that such process is too much time consuming. Managers need to practice the attributes of understanding and effectiveness, whilst supervising the employees. Good teamwork can’t be just easily achieved, but employing appropriate tactics, you could propagate the essence of teamwork within your team. An environment of cooperation and trust permits you to achieve your aims in timely manner.