One of the most highly valued skills in organisations, and an essential requirement for any person applying for a new professional position, is the ability to teamwork. It is a recurrent phrase in most of the speeches of managers and middle managers, and also an unavoidable content in any strategic plan, as it is the philosopher's stone that guarantees the success of any business vision.
However, do we really know what teamwork means, the great difficulties involved in building a high-performance team and maintaining its focus?
The answer is surprising, since most organisations associate teamwork with an altruistic collaboration of co-workers, so that everyone is willing to help the "needy" colleague, and to do part of his or her work and even replace him or her immediately if necessary, in a cheerful and empathetic spirit. Always under the attentive guidance of a caring leader, who must take care of the good working atmosphere.
There is no doubt that this peace at work and this "good feeling" is a myth, since high-performance teams go through phases of high conflict among their members, and also have an expiry date. Moreover, it is not always effective to work in a team.
If we look at the internal dynamics of top-level competitive sports teams, which are much more mediatic than those in a business environment, we can observe such unique situations as the psychological dejection of the group in important matches, conflicts between the players themselves, poor relations with the leader/coach, individually brilliant players who perform poorly as a team, and a pressing need to change the leader or several players after a successful stage of the team.
All these realities are natural and inherent to high-performance teams, and therefore unavoidable for all companies or projects that seek to foster teamwork.
This is because high-performance teams are built on the diversity of competencies and opinions of its members, in order to achieve a shared common purpose, making the most of these personal differences to get the best out of everyone. This integration of individual competencies is not easy, as it requires time and adequate leadership, which leads the group to integrate the values of the organisation and to assume the objectives and challenges that are expected as a team. The leader must channel a necessary phase of conflict constructively, encouraging assertive communication between team members, so that differences of opinion on how to act and solve problems can be brought to the surface. This conflict is unavoidable, as it highlights the egos The teamwork of each individual, to gain visibility vis-à-vis the leader by trying to impose their ideas on the other members of the group, or to express their conviction that individual action is more effective than group action. Teamwork will always bring more value to a company, as it generates a synergy invaluable, where the result obtained as a team is superior to the sum of the individual performances, because their performance is based on the complementarity of each member's best abilities. This complementarity arises from this constructive conflict, a phase in which people will eventually recognise each other in an environment of respect and honesty, by showing their own strengths and weaknesses, and understanding when they must contribute their best for the success of the team, knowing that their colleagues trust in their skills.
As we can see in a Formula 1 team, every member of the team is competent in his function and is absolutely focused on the execution of that function. The success of a race, and therefore of the team, depends not only on the skill of the driver, but also on the professionalism and speed of his colleagues in their tasks, on whom he places absolute trust to the extent that he also puts his life at risk. It would be unthinkable to see the driver helping a colleague to refuel or repair the vehicle, but this situation is not uncommon in most companies, where cooperation is often confused with teamwork.
On the other hand, the creation of high-performance teams is not always efficient, as there are certain business processes that are highly standardised and repetitive, for which it is more profitable to carry them out individually, as it optimises the function and avoids the time and resources involved in creating a team.
We must also be aware that high-performance teams have an expiry date, as teams eventually lose their ability to adapt to the environment after a period of continued success. This is because team members cohere in such a way that they end up having a single thinking They generate an internal climate in which they avoid giving opinions that could emotionally attack their colleagues or bring about change. It is a situation in which the group has lost its competitive advantage as the synergy effect, which was the result of a complementary sum of their initial discrepancies, which allowed the team to give different responses to changes in the environment, has disappeared.
When you enter this phase you have to make changes in the team, either through a new project, a change of the leader or a change of some of the team members. By introducing new challenges and break this single, refractory thinking, diversity is again encouraged, and thus a new phase of instability, conflict and adaptation is entered. To speed up these phases, we theorists have worked on the design of templates for observing people's behaviour, which make it possible to quickly and easily identify different team roles, that each employee can perform successfully, based on their own competencies and levels of complementarity with other team members, so that managers, middle managers and employees can effectively shape and integrate into high-performance teams.
Joan Anton Ros Guasch, Founder ETBO and Doctor in Psychology.
Article published in the magazine CATALUÑA ECONOMICA in January 2019 and later in the videoblog of Patrimonia-Universidad Pompeu Fabra on 22 October 2020.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHQaEmlHP8w&t=42s