Sustaining Business Newsletter

A Group is Not Necessarily a Team
By Rhett Hendrickson

Teamwork is defined as the process of working collaboratively with a group of people in order to achieve a goal.  It sounds exactly like football, doesn't it?  A football team is a group of people with differing characteristics and abilities that works together to achieve a goal.  There are multiple levels of leadership, some on-field and some off-field.  The team and its leadership have spent countless hours building their strength and decision making accuracies in practices, drills, and in researching the opposition.  They know how they will react given a certain situation.  They have learned to anticipate difficulties and circumvent those difficulties by drawing on the various talents of the members.  The coach instructs the quarterback to call a certain play but as soon as the ball is snapped, it's the team that has to work together to implement that plan.  If the team doesn't understand the objective, doesn't have faith in the coach's decisions or have confidence that their fellow players can and will do their part, then the play usually fails.

A marketing executive at software giant Citrix (makers of GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting, among others) is quoted as having said, "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say."  Although that seems like an absurd definition, it's quite common.  Too many leaders find it easier to simply wade into the game and start calling shots without bothering to share the playbook with the team members or hold any practices.  The really unsuccessful businesses have employees slated as running backs when they might be more suited to playing offensive lineman.  

My point is this:  Teambuilding is not a new idea.  It's not a fad, and its importance will not fade so long as individuals are asked to work together toward a common goal.  

Teambuilding is required.  

Coaches need to be trained to assess the situation, develop a game plan, put the right people on the team, give them appropriate direction, let the team run the plays, and then learn from their successes and failures so that they can adapt to the next challenge.  They need to understand that the more they train, the better the plays stick in the players' heads.   Players need to learn their relative strengths and abilities so that they understand not only their own place on the team, but also everyone else's place.  They should understand the coaches' importance in guiding the team to success.  They need to know to whom they should go when a situation arises that they cannot handle and they should practice their roles so that they can operate at peak performance automatically - wasting little time and few resources preparing for the play.  

Hendrickson Business Advisors has more than three decades' combined experience in building good teams and preparing them to win.  Whether you need help with recruiting key members, evaluating their strengths and abilities, or simply getting them to work as a team rather than a collection of individuals, contact us to improve your overall record.