Team Synergy

Individual’s attitude and behavior changes in the presence of other individual or group of people, this change in behavior could be better or worse, this is called social influence. Some individuals gain benefits from group work, as they perform better, or the presence of others motivates them to do their best to introduce effective results, simply they get excited by teamwork. For other individuals, group or teamwork can lead to less productivity; this might be caused by their reliance on other team members, or because of his ego, he prefers to be recognized and get all the credit for himself. While working with my previous employer, a colleague of mine prefers working alone, even in big projects that obviously needed teamwork, and management used to mitigate this by engaging another team member to work with him by force, and this used to affect his productivity. The outcome of teamwork is noticeably better than individuals work, team to me means harmony, shared goal, and trust. Team members trust each other and are welling to replace each other in case of their absence; every one of them knows what is expected from him and contributes to their maximum.

I appreciated teamwork and its effectiveness over individual work when we faced a problem in our organization that we couldn’t overcome without the teamwork. The Main Data center caught fire, data center temperature reached 60 degrees Celsius and all systems went off automatically. The operator informed the team members; unfortunately one of the team members was outside the country, the rest of the team came immediately to the office to see the mass of the damage and plan for the recovery plan. The team members consisted of in-house team, outsourced team and remote support, although most of team members were specialized technical individuals, but this incident made each of the team members to propose solution within and outside his area of specialty. We managed to lower data center temperature to reach a stage were we can power on the servers again, then we started the systems based on our plan and their priority, and succeeded in carrying on operations in a very short time compared to the size of the damage. Without the harmony between team members this could never be achieved, as well no single team member regardless of his experience, knowledge and capability would have succeeded without the teamwork.

To generalize this experience, and to enhance team capability I would suggest the following:

1)                 Selecting team members: the first and most important aspect in teamwork is selecting team members, team members should have soft skills in addition to their technical knowledge, they should be able to make decisions, think outside the box and be good listeners.

2)                 Communication: using all available approaches whether face-to-face or technology based communication. Sharing ideas and concerns make the problem in hand easier to tackle.

3)                 Smooth flow of information: individuals should share information among other team members; this eases the recovery of team member absence.

4)                 Readiness to offer and ask for help: team members should offer help where ever they believe they can add value, and ask for help distributes the load of work with others.

5)                 Building trust: trust should exist between team members.

6)            Clear accountability, each team member should know his roles.

There is no simple procedure to enhance a team, however communication, information sharing and trust between team members will create the harmony.

Reference:

Buchanan, D., & Huczynski, A., (2010). ‘Organizational Behaviour’. Prentice Hall.

Gregroy D., Brenda S., (2000), ‘Building teams, synergy, and your resources’

Association of Operating Room Nurses. AORN Journal; Sep 2000; 72, 3; pg. 372-374, ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source, [Online].

(Accessed 27 May 2011)

Hoegl, M, & Gemuenden, H., (2001), 'Teamwork Quality and the Success of Innovative Projects: A Theoretical Concept and Empirical Evidence', Organization Science, 12, 4, pp. 435-449, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, [Online].  (Accessed 27 May 2011)