How to Recognize Collaboration and Successful Team Building
Successful team building benefits from the type of corporate team culture that Zappos and Toyota have. Read more on how internal competition frays team trust and reduces team intelligence.
Collaboration & Successful Team Building
How to Recognize Collaboration and Successful Team Building
Dianne Crampton helps leaders connect their employees to their corporate values and team culture using her TIGERS trademarked team culture process. For a free white paper on behaviors that build strong teams go to http://www.teambuildingsuccessnow.com
On a tour of Zappos recently, our tour guide, fondly referred to as Peanut by her coworkers, was asked if team members compete against one another for rewards. Peanut pondered the question for a minute and said, “I’m not sure if I understand your question. We have a competition for the best attendance, is that what you mean?”
This type of response is typical from an employee in a true Team Culture. The thought of pitting one team member against another for rewards that would advance one career over another, is not within the team’s development plan for two reasons.
- It splinters team loyalty, frays relationships and lays the foundation for mistrust.
- It erodes trust, thereby blocking the upward growth and improvement of team intelligence.
For example, smart teams will always excel against companies whose corporate process rewards the individual or when team building is morphed from an internally competitive framework.
In the example of Zappos, a team of six project managers achieves more goals than the industry average of 30 project managers for a comparably sized organization.
With regards to Peanut’s response, if competition exists it is in the realm of becoming a better person – healthier, more fit, more generous as a mentor, or a better team citizen. In these areas rewards are sometime given not only to the employee, but to the employee’s family as well.
Zappos, for example recognizes out-of-the-ordinary excellence for supporting other team members with a weekly Random Acts of Kindness award. And team cultures like Toyota will recognize the family for an employee’s outstanding attendance.
The practice of not pitting one team member against another, or one internal team against another evolves from the universal team value, interdependence. Interdependence is based on principles of collaboration and the notion, if we win, I win.
Interdependence requires a higher level of individual maturity, personal accountability and self reflection than what’s expected of employees in a non- team culture.
For this reason, true team cultures are difficult to get into. Careful screening and evaluation goes into bringing an employee candidate on board. And the on-boarding process itself is geared to the employee’s optimum success.
This means that much of the awkward stress and confusion that goes with learning a new job and becoming comfortable with team personalities is minimized to maximize the collective win.
Reduce internal competition and watch your team win in the marketpace — the place where competition belongs.
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The review "How to Recognize Collaboration and Successful Team Building" was last updated on 01/9/09.
