Teamwork

Every company I’ve been in, as a guest speaker, in the past twenty years and every CEO I have spoken to, over the same time, has told me the same thing: “Teamwork is important.” The theme of ‘playing nice together’ comes up again and again as a desirable objective to achieve.

There’s a good reason for that. Beyond the desirability of the mental image of the people who work inside a business marching to the same tune, sharing the same objectives and having the same values, there is the fact that “teamwork helps organizations save time and money while improving collaboration, efficiency, transparency, and productivity”.

Studies have shown that when it comes to solving problems, groups perform better than the best individuals. A business, in order to be profitable, needs to operate like a sausage factory, taking average ingredients and transforming them into a premium-value product.

This cannot happen if the people inside the business are in a state of virtual war with each other or are guided by a different understanding of what the business does and the way it operates. Teamwork allows people of diverse experiences, knowledge and backgrounds come together with common goals and a shared sense of purpose.

Swedish-American entrepreneur Frans Johansson calls this The Medici Effect (and he’s written a book to explain it). ?The name is derived from the Medici Dynasty, an Italian banking family that came to power in the 14th century. The family's wealth was able to support artists that led to The Renaissance which, in turn, led Europe out of the relative ignorance and darkness of The Middle Ages.

A Safe Harbor

There are significant lessons we can learn from The Medici Effect and the scientific studies that prove the benefits of teamwork. But the key question I will answer today is why, when we intuitively understand how desirable teamwork is in a business, do we find it so difficult to establish it?

The answer to this is fundamental: Trust. Trust is the willingness to accept that interactions with those around us, whom we don’t know, are going to have an overall positive outcome. For that to happen we all need to be able to feel the following:

• Welcomed. Businesses draw employees from all walks of life. If there is no sense of celebration in their being there it will lead to mistrust, in-fighting and friction. All of these tend to increase the cost of doing business by making even the easiest thing become difficult to put into operation.
• Accepted. We are hardwired to judge others. It’s the first litmus test we apply in order to understand if we should trust them. What may have worked in a tribal setting where homogeneity was a good indicator of when and how trust should be apportioned, no longer works in the modern work place. If we are unable to make those around us feel accepted they will, in turn, be incapable of contributing meaningfully to the work that needs to be done.
• Valued. We tend to listen only to those whose voice and opinion we value. We value only those we respect. We respect those we feel we can trust. This is a chain of association of traits that create the work environment where co-workers well together. Unless we value a person for who they are we will be unable to listen to what they say, consider it fairly and weigh it in view of the collective goals we are supposed to support.

These three attributes create a safe harbor environment where mistakes become learning experiences instead of opportunities to punish someone and the willingness to try new things and experiment frequently leads to innovation, which in turn improves productivity.

To achieve this, however, those three attributes are key. They are the ingredient which helps build trust and when trust is present then everything else becomes possible.?