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You
are likely to find yourself working on at least one team
during your career; serving on a team can be an enormously
rewarding experience, allowing you to more fully develop
your potential. It can also be enormously frustrating,
if the team is dysfunctional or doesn't have a clearly
defined purpose, for example. Despite their potential
pitfalls, more and more, organizations are utilizing teams
to tackle the issues and problems facing them.
Understanding what makes a team effective and being a
good team player make you a more valuable employee as
well as increase your chances for enjoyment and satisfaction
in your career. This module will introduce you to concepts
of team building and offer you strategies for ensuring
that teams with which you are involved are as successful
as possible.
Our lives abound with examples of teams - from basketball
to study groups to accident investigation boards. In the
engineering world, teams are formed to handle projects,
processes, and designs, and may be ongoing or temporary.
Examples of project teams include proposal writing teams
(to learn more about proposal writing, check out the PPC
module Writing Winning Proposals: An Introduction) and
problem solving or accident investigation teams, such
as the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. Process
teams may be ongoing functional teams responsible for
maintaining functional processes such as assembly plant
management, or temporary process improvement or reengineering
teams, responsible for improving or optimizing process
by which a product or service is delivered. Design teams
are those responsible for the design and development of
new products or processes.
A team is a group of people coming together to collaborate
on a task for which they are mutually accountable; it
is not just a collection of people grouped together for
administrative convenience. To become a team, a group
must have:
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Shared
responsibility |
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Shared
information |
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Unity
of purpose |
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A
clearly defined objective |
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Authority
(power) |
.
A useful team outperforms a group and outperforms all
reasonable expectations of its individual members. That
is, a team produces synergy, where one plus one equals
a lot more than two! Good team members are deeply committed
to each other's personal growth and success, as well as
that of the team.
Team members not only cooperate in all aspects of their
mutual tasks and goals; they share in what are traditionally
thought of as management functions, such as planning,
organizing, setting performance goals, assessing the team's
performance, developing their own strategies to manage
change, and securing their own resources. An ideal team
offers three major benefits to an organization:
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It
maximizes the organization's human resources. Members
help and lead each other and share in each other's
successes and failures. Members are more willing
to take chances, because they do not shoulder all
the blame for failures, and they enjoy the satisfaction
of the group's successes. |
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A
team will outperform a group of individuals because
of the synergistic effect of a team. |
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There
is continuous improvement, as team members pull
together and push aside their personal conflicts.
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You might wonder what makes a team so successful when
its members are the same people who already work for the
organization. Experts who have studied teams say the benefits
to the individual - less stress because of shared responsibilities,
and feelings of involvement and accomplishment - result
in increased productivity, increased quality of work,
increased employee morale, reduced cost, reduced losses
and, ultimately, increased profits.
Let's look at the elements of a successful team and how
to form one.
Purchase
the complete set of online modules
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