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Training for your Teams
The notion of teams is getting more and more attention these days. A recent study indicates that 3,000 managers and executives from 23 countries rate good teamwork as one of the highest priorities for business as we move into the 21st Century. These same managers and executives are also dissatisfied with the performances of most of the teams with which they are acquainted. The research that has been conducted on teams in the last decade or so has clearly demonstrated that teams can be more productive and innovative because you get diverse people bringing different resources to bear on a single problem. Makes sense. However, what many companies have done is to simply put people together in a group and call them teams. Small wonder they don't work so well. It's clear when you watch a football team, that the dynamics between the members in great part determines their success. You can have the best football players in the league, and if they don't work together as a team, they won't succeed. The same is true with business teams, if we expect them to function as true teams, rather than just as groups. Many organizations so believe in teams that they put people together and expect them to function at high levels, even if there is no shared common goal, and the people are not interdependent. Part of being a team member implies some degree of dependency on the rest of the team to be successful. And certainly for the team to pull in the same direction, there has to be some commonly recognized goal that is relevant to the team. "Making the shareholders happy," is not a very exciting team goal for most businesses. One researcher, Eduardo Salas, Ph.D. at the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division in Orlando, Florida, has discovered through his research that when team members are trained together it has a positive impact on future team behavior. In short, being trained together to do things seems to have a positive impact on the functional level of a team. Salas summarizes it this way: "Team training is different from team building. With team building, people get to know each other on a personal level. But team training is more specificpeople learn each others' competencies and the requirements of their team task." Learning about each others competencies seems to have a positive impact on how the team functions in the future. It is not always easy for organizations to take entire teams away from business operations to provide training to them, but Salas is suggesting it be one of the more important things that managers and executives can facilitate to improve the quality of their organizations' teams. Janelle Barlow, President TMI, USA
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