The Importance of Working Together in Groups and Teams Essay -- Teamwo

The Importance of Working Together in Groups and Teams Realizing that a group can become a high performance team is important. Accomplishing this goal is invaluable, advantageous and profitable. Once able to operate from a group to the high performing team is a great step into preparation into the big business world. Leaders and members must also realize not only how to accomplish this but that some problems will and can arise from different demographic characteristics and cultural diversity. That is if one is in such a group, which the probability would be quite high. It is important that members of a group be knowledgeable and skillful in their positions, the degree to which those members can work harmoniously and cooperatively together is equally important and will form into a high performance team. Effective team management plays a high role in building high performance teams. It should always be a question as to what management can do to actively promote successful work teams. Skills and knowledge possessed by every member is also important for a team to become high performance. Although it is among the most important factors, however, it must be coupled with a good working relationship with every team member and good collaboration with every team member. The members who possess the good skills and wide knowledge will be a useful resource to the team if that team member can share their strengths with the other team members and vice versa. It is usually misconstrued that having skillful and intelligent team members is already enough to make a team work right. This kind of thinking is the reason why most teams, despite all of those competent members they have, fail to achieve their goals. A team should establish one common goal, not to think that way and develop a good working relationship with each member. (retrieved from: http://www.strictlysuccess.com, August 18, 2005) This can be done by self awareness exercises, like the DISC assessment and other assess ments or any other kind of self awareness exercises regarding communication style differences. Then these factors and important pieces of information should be taken into full consideration before the actual project is begun. These exercise or assessments can be great ice breakers and mark the difference between a group of individuals merely assigned to a team, as opposed to functioning as... ...of the direction of the project is to come. Whenever demographic or cultural diversity issues become array and cause conflicts and start interfering with the work or projects getting done, just like any other problem inducers, it is the client, the customers, the leaders and or the other stakeholders that are going to be dissatisfied with the results and they are the ones who will experience the negative results. All this may seem a little overwhelming and tiresome to some or to all, but do be assured it is not as hard as it seems. Just keep in mind that you have to embrace the differences between all the demographic characteristics and the culturally diverse team members that make up your group. This with an open mind, and a willingness to cooperate, compromise, and the pleasure to collaborate will harvest many great results and have the organization reaping the many great benefits along with a great top of the line fueled to the rim high performance team. References: Wisdom of Teams; Katzenbach & Smith (2003) HarperCollins Publishers The Team Learning Assistant Workbook; Jeffrey G. Miller (2004) McGraw-Hill Companies, The http://www.strictlysuccess.com/