We all acknowledge the power of brilliant teamwork – it’s ability to nurture real collaboration, to grow personal and collective learning, and the synergy of creating more than the sum of its parts. While it takes energy, compassion and committed intent to build a great team, when they are set up and led effectively teams are the most powerful unit to create belonging, nurture wellbeing and scaffold individual and collective development.
However, teams invariably operate in dynamic environments and change can easily upset the often-delicate balance holding harmony and performance together.
Hence, we also all experience the challenge of maintaining great teamwork in our dynamic world where lots of things within, and around, our teams continue to change. Team members come and go. Products, services, and client expectations change. Skills needs evolve. The list is almost endless.
Change is a constant and, since most teams just battle through the chaos, it is fairly inevitable that dysfunctions begin to appear. In the end, we begin to accept the way things are as a matter of fact. We become resigned to dysfunction and live with less-than-optimal performance.
Hence, it can be no surprise that the vast majority of teams are underperforming relative to their true potential.
How do we sustain brilliant teamwork in this dynamic world?
It takes great courage and resolve to break out of old adversarial habits and embrace true collaboration. However, when finger-pointing and blame are suspended and replaced with joint endeavour to find collective solutions, the results don’t just give rise to faster and more cost-effective outcomes; most importantly, they invariably lead to breakthroughs. Things that previously seemed impossible become possible.
Teaming is the art of building, adapting and re-building teams swiftly and efficiently. Teaming enables us to access the power of teamwork more consistently and more powerfully. Building teaming competence within an organisation supports agility and enables individuals to be productive team members swiftly and proficiently - including the ability to be productive team members of multi-teams. Ultimately, teaming arms us with the core competence to create great teamwork even in the challenging world of VUCA.
Teaming builds shared understanding, supports personal development, nurtures belonging and promotes a deep sense of inclusion that raises harmony and wellbeing. Teaming-based organisations benefit from a more productive use of talent and increased engagement, not just of work colleagues but all stakeholders. As a result, organisations become great places to work, great partners to work with and gain huge leaps in wellbeing and productivity.
Great teaming, therefore, is one of the most powerful counters to team instability and to the ‘great resignation’.
Hence, intentionally nurturing a teaming culture becomes exponentially beneficial. The more we embrace teaming as a core to our business and embed it into our culture, the greater we glean the benefits of brilliant teamwork.
You can learn more about the practice of teaming in our next article, here.
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