Teamwork needs training… because no matter how social you are, or how professional you are, or how expert in your field, good teamwork is fraught with difficulty. An expert manager must be social, professional, and expert.
A team brings greater leverage, but on the flip side, problems in a team can have a compounding effect on poor performance for each individual team member. And managing a team comes with a web of factors to untangle and control. So just…
What kind of teamwork training is best partly depends on the situation and the team, but it’s easy enough to appreciate that the solution to teamwork training can be described with 3 components: Outcome, Constraints and Processes.
- Outcome means the identification of what you want to achieve via the team. Both the team’s grand purpose or objective, as well as it’s collaborative projects which lead towards that overall desired outcome.
- Constraints management means knowing where you are and what’s in the way of getting to where you want.
- Productivity is the ways and means (the ‘how to’) for achieving the identified outcome through projects and process by eliminating the constraints.
That might seem somewhat circular, and it is. That’s why it is an undeniably clear and precise protocol on which to base teamwork training for success. It’s easy to see how clarity of outcomes, managing constraints, and managing the throughput of activities will facilitate greater cohesion within the team.