What are the constraints of teamwork?
Differences in ideas, skills, motivations, even beliefs can constrain a team’s performance. A lack of resources and tools such as communication systems can slow a team down. Insufficient planning from a lack of open discussion can lead to conflicts and misunderstandings.
In fact, through primary research as well as my own experience over a decade of work in companies both large and small, I discovered a number of fundamental causes of poor teamwork.
They can be grouped under 4 categories. This is the Teamwork Training Molecule…
- Problems caused by upper management
- Problems caused by team managers
- Problems caused in team cohesion
- Problems with individual team members
“The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.” – Babe Ruth
Problems, problems, problems. Upper management wants to have it’s say, and often causes disruption for teamwork. Team managers themselves often lack the experience of successfully guiding team collaboration and performance. Thus teams do not have the cohesion of a purposefully aligned team, and there may even be specific problems with individual members of the team such as resistance to change, incompentence, or just plain old chronic laziness.