Soft Skills

The global manager

How to create an environment suitable for teamwork. By Kavya Shetty

While teamwork and leadership are often no more than fancy catchwords for most MBAs, the successful management of organisations is entirely dependent on the efficiency of an organisation's teams and the quality of its leaders. Teamwork does more than simply create a sense of camaraderie; it facilitates the flow of information and a synergistic sharing of ideas, besides contributing to sustaining and, ultimately, reflecting the idea of a cohesive organisation culture. The necessity to build and foster teamwork within organisations, therefore, continues to be a much-researched area in the field of organisational behaviour and human resource management.

While the creation of teams lends itself easily to some firms like global consulting majors, work dedicated to particular cases or firms involved in product development, it is more difficult to imagine their necessity in more technical roles, such as investment banking. For example, the product development process must necessarily involve people from diverse functional areas such as engineering design, manufacturing, marketing, finance and logistics to ensure success. Trading securities in international markets, underwriting IPOs, structuring deals and other similar pursuits, however, are more individual in nature. And yet, research shows that organisations which promote teamwork and encourage employees to interact and work together are often far more successful than those that encourage working alone or fail to create an environment suitable for teamwork.

Traditional methods of team creation and sustenance have been based on measures of performance and incentive sharing, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the motivation for teamwork must come from the employee and that the organisation is merely a facilitator in the process. And yet, while it is true that certain individuals are better suited to working in teams, teamwork is a skill that may be taught and acquired over time and through practice and dedication.

The first step to creating an environment conducive to teamwork, therefore, is obviously the recruitment of people who work well in teams and enjoy the associated flux of ideas that inevitably comes from such a process, as opposed to the traditional Lone Ranger. Organisations often use different methods to identify such candidates, even while recruiting at IIMs, through group discussions and team-building exercises. Recognising the need to train students to function efficiently in teams, IIMs have introduced teamwork as a part of several courses by requiring students to work in groups of varying sizes on projects and other exercises. Most organisations put employees through similar training programmes as well, and the growing emphasis on these programmes indicates that this is a need that has been recognised across the board.

As mentioned earlier, the organisation is merely a facilitating entity in this process. And yet, there are systems and structures that must be put in place to sustain teams. The second step to team building must, therefore, be the construction and administration of a holistic incentive system for teams. One of the common means of achieving this is by setting common goals for an entire team and appraising performance of teams rather than individuals. This ensures employee involvement in the process since rewards become dependent on the collective, and is beneficial to the organisation at large, since teams of employees become self-governing entities. These teams become a microcosm of the entire organisation, in some sense, and as they set objectives for themselves and work towards achieving them, they replicate the processes of the organisation as a whole.

Another common technique used at several organisations is the promotion of cross-functional and dynamic teams. Cross functional teams allow employees to interact with a diverse set of people and share in an overall view of the organisation that may not be available to them within more conventional teams. In addition, dynamic teams force employees out of their comfort zones as they continuously interact with new people and work on new projects. It is essential, however, for organisations to also simultaneously devise mechanisms to prevent group-thought or a herd mentality, to ensure healthy debate. While in some cases, teams may bring out instances of free-riding by employees, in general, it has been found that they give employees a chance to exercise greater responsibility with more freedom, ultimately leading to greater job satisfaction.