Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
THE REAL REASONS WHY WORK TEAMS HAVE TROUBLE WORKING TOGETHER By Bart Allen Berry,
Working to develop better teamwork with over 200,000 managers and employees over the past 30 years has given me some great insights about why teams sometimes don't work their best. We all know the symptoms when teamwork is not happening: disgruntled attitudes, strained relationships, competitiveness, lack of communication, no collaboration or creativity, formal rather than informal relations with one another, hiding information, not sharing resources, formation of cliques, sabotaging one another's work- in short, many of our supposed professionals at work act more like kids on an elementary school playground. This is all very interesting to watch from a sociological behavior perspective, but worrisome when one begins to analyze the bottom line impacts on the organization. First we have the impacts on individual performance. When people aren't happy themselves, they don't work at their best. If they aren't getting the support and cooperation they need, they are Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
handicapped from the start and will have to swim upstream that much harder to do their job. People who don't feel comfortable at work will leave for a better opportunityadding turnover and re-training costs. Impacts on work processes are the next area impacted by sour team behaviors. Most work processes require people to help them work smoothly and sometimes will take extra attention and energy from everyone when they are running at capacity. Without great teamwork, work processes will never run at their full capacity, some will experience unplanned interruptions while others will seem as if they could be improved more if they only had that extra special 'something'. That something is good teamwork. Customer relationships are another obvious casualty of a lack of teamwork. Hand-offs between employees and departments that don't happen, critical or subtle information that doesn't get communicated, or the inevitable denial and finger pointing at another employee or department who was supposed to be ‘taking care of that’. Lack of Teamwork can affect the bottom line in obvious ways like losing customers or subtle ways like waste, redundancy and re-work because employees aren't working well together.
Enough said about the symptoms and impacts of a lack of teamwork, but what are some of the main causes of poor Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
teamwork? From my own experience working with hundreds of companies, there are several all-too-common reasons that get in the way of good teamwork developing. POOR TEAMWORK FOUNDATIONS are the first reason why teamwork doesn't happen as well as it should. What we are talking about here is the clarification of the core purpose and charter of the team. Not only the mission- what the team is supposed to do, but the key deliverables, core processes, and critical metrics for performance by which the team can know how well it is doing. Work teams don't often take enough time to re-emphasize these fundamentals, and many teams just go along from day to day with goals and objectives increasingly muddled, new staff added and subtracted, processes and policies changed, and priorities left up to many- to decide for themselves. When these clear foundations are not established, complex work environments will tend to increase importance and attention to many areas that just aren't as important, or worse- aren't directly linked to the fulfillment of key objectives. When objectives and priorities aren't clear, each employee or small group will naturally advocate for their own priorities as they see them, increasing the potential of running into conflict with others who might see things differently. Each employee begins to protect their own little universe more and more, since they have little assurance or control over what Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
they don't know, don't understand or can't control in some other department. After awhile, as team members really get further off course, someone from higher up the food chain will have to come in and take drastic measures to straighten things out again- which usually ends up as a costly and stressful process for everyone.
TEAMWORK SKILLS are often lacking or totally neglected in work groups of all kinds. These learned set of behaviors are designed to keep an entire workgroup engaged and contributing, maximizing the potential, productivity and effectiveness of the team. When any work group starts out, the teamwork skills they have are the ones they arrive with- which is usually a mixed bag at best. Even when some members might be great at facilitating communication, contribution, and collaboration within their group, the political environment of the team might not welcome it, or worse- there simply aren't enough meetings that provide the opportunity to question how the team is working together. Sometimes the reliance on positional authority (an obvious symptom of lack of teamwork) creates too formal of a structure to allow for a truly dynamic and interactive team approach to work at all, with decisions controlled solely by those with the designated authority and responsibility- (read: no one else).
Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
Working on teamwork skills will positively affect everything the work group will do together. Practicing team work skills, integrating fresh approaches to problem solving and idea generation, learning to tap the lesserknown resources within your own team, and building the esprit de corps that comes from overcoming challenges together- these are proactive decisions a team makes to try to continually operate better. By neglecting to improve teamwork skills, work groups set themselves up for a much harder grind. INVOLVEMENT AND PARTICIPATION runs to the heart of each individual employee's need to self actualize in their work. Most team members like to have input, to participate in decisions and the creation of their own processes. This helps develop a sense of ownership about their work and the output of their department. When involvement and participation are denied, or blocked employees are less fulfilled, and many will quickly become clock punchers with little commitment or initiative, always on the look out for a more fulfilling situation. No one likes to 'feel like a number', but in many workgroups, a culture of utility rather than feeling like a valued contributor increases sick days, turnover and a lack of commitment to the team and its responsibilities.
Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
THE HUMAN EGO in its many manifestations, shows itself to be detrimental to healthy teamwork when it is threatened. The negative aspects of the EGO manifest themselves in ways that appear in every large organization. Employees will develop separatenessand form themselves into small cliques who are somehow more important than the other employees, departments or team members fostering competitiveness and secretive behaviors, rather than openness, cooperation and trust. Fear of not getting something, of being fired, of being shown to be not competent, and a hundred other anxieties cause individuals to put barriers between one another out of self protection. This is often the case when team foundations, directions and goals aren't absolutely clear- when individuals are in a constant state of insecurity about what is going to happen and if it is going to affect them or their work. Without a stronger sense of commitment to the team and trust in other team members, fearful individuals will be continually evaluating their own actions and that of others in a suspicious, calculating light – mainly out of self preservation. Pride can be another potential block to good teamwork and is the most common description attributed to those with big Egos. Pride puts separation between individuals and departments in a work environment, where the accomplishments of some evolve into a sense of entitlement or playing by a different set of rules than others. "We're responsible for selling the big account so we don't have to follow the policies of the other sales personnel", or Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
"We are the engineering team, and nothing will work without us our needs are more important than any other department" etc. Pride damages a sense of equality and can hurt the development of teamwork culture. Defensiveness is one of the ugliest manifestations of the negative Ego. When the Ego feels threatened, it lashes out to protect its identity and self image, fomenting dramatic conflicts and real damage to relationships that are often irresolvable. When a work conflict like this happens, and after really negative things have been done or said, it becomes increasingly hard for individuals to work together on the same team. Many good employees will leave rather than have their persona, professionalism or integrity challenged by anyone. Some will work secretly behind the scenes to 'get even' when their Ego has been damaged by another's insults, slights, or intentional criticism. How to behave on a team and in a team, to minimize dysfunction and maximize synergy is something many employees simply never get the chance to develop self-awareness about. TEAM LEADERSHIP is the last common detractor from the development of great teamwork- where it is lacking or uneven. Unfortunately, in a leaner economy, staffing is usually overburdened with demands and responsibilities - leaving the leaders of most work teams focusing on deliverables, rather than Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
the evolution of how their people work together. Unfortunately, neglect of the team will sooner or later turn into problems between individuals, process breakdowns, or other drops in performance that will demand the leader's (or manager's) attention- usually at an inconvenient time in the middle of a big project. Leading teamwork means taking stock of how the workgroup functions together and making proactive efforts towards continual improvement in not only formal work processes, but teamwork skills, relationships and attention to the involvement and participation of each team member. Effective team leaders make coaching subordinates a big part of their job. The team leader (or manager in charge of the work group) is the defacto creator of their own mini-organizational culture within the work group. This culture will always evolve into something, but it can be influenced with a more positive team atmosphere when the team leader makes it a priority. Much of the responsibility for making sure teamwork happens falls on the shoulders of the team leader. It is unlikely that most work teams will muster the attention and experience with team development to intervene in their own teamwork dynamics and way of operating. There are many proven benefits to having an outside training firm make a strong impact, when they are outside the politics, recent history and human dynamics of each unique group. The common causes that get in the way of teamwork happening at work can be overcome with a change in approach and perspective. Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
Bart Allen Berry Consulting has delivered team building and team development programs for hundreds of companies in six countries and have seen the toughest work groups turned around with their one and two day teamwork programs. Teams who change their awareness of their own way of operating, and learn the new approaches emphasized in their team training programs become much more effective together, are more satisfied and fulfilled as employees, and have their productivity and output much closer aligned with the performance of organization demands. Our training programs bring a highly efficient and effective process- that helps each team turn around fast- and to begin working together in healthier ways the following day after a training program. Bart Allen Berry Bart Allen Berry is an internationally recognized team work expert who has trained more than 200,000 managers and employees, and worked with hundreds of companies from the fortune 500 and government to international firms and entrepreneurial start-ups. Bart is an author and speaker and also operates an experiential team learning center in Baja Mexico.
Contact us to request a proposal for your next team building program
Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential
See our complete family of Teamwork Tools and Team Assessments and Surveys designed to aid in your Team Building efforts.
Bart Allen Berry Consulting
Helping Organizations Reach Their Potential