By: Edwin Ebreo
In all my years as a team building facilitator and participant, I have observed that five factors affect the success or failure of teamwork. They are:
• Leadership
• Team Dynamics
• Communication Skills
• Team working environment, process or tools
Of all these, leadership is pivotal.
As I facilitate teambuilding workshops, I observe the leaders’ behavior and it would give me an inkling as to how far a teambuilding effort can go. In many instances, I would see leaders as not ready to lead a team who has agreed to change the way they do things. This results to frustration and cynicism towards the entire teambuilding effort and the next ones to follow. Leaders create the environment for teamwork to blossom and are largely responsible for team dynamics. Without their clear understanding and acceptance of this role, they are unlikely to facilitate team interactions effectively.
The quality of communication impacts teamwork. If the team is to pursue heightened collaboration, everybody, especially the leaders must prefer to use assertive communication style. As you are probably aware of. This is seldom the style used in a Filipino team interaction. It’s often the leaders using a variety of style from aggressive to passive, to assertive while the staff remains generally passive. This setup mostly lead to herd mentality and lack of engagement. If the team is to engage and commit to a strategy, they need to learn how to be more assertive and leaders must establish an environment that encourage assertiveness. Because assertiveness is not a default communication style in the Philippines, members of teams must be trained and coached in order to develop this skill.
The last factor involves team working processes and tools.
I believe that the availability of venues, process and tools like Six Sigma, Process Improvement Teams, utilization of any problem solving and decision making tools will help sustain teamwork. I believe that management can help team members develop that sense of ownership and commitment to better work if they are involved in activities that help them identify problems that get in the way of productivity and profitability and solve them. By training employees how to use these tools and institutionalizing the use of the tools, employees will have concrete tools they can use to find ways to work better and achieve team goals.
Overall, I believe that a holistic plan that include leadership development, staff competency building and training on the use of process improvement and problem solving tools should form part and parcel of team culture building initiative.
This is what we are offering at ExeQserve, a holistic approach to establishing and sustaining teamwork.