reflective writing about teamwork

reflective writing about teamwork

The Power of Teamwork

1. Introduction

The “Power of Teamwork” is a concept that has been around for a long time. Why is it still relevant today? Why is it still difficult to do? Why are there so few good teams? If teamwork is so good and so powerful, then why is it so challenging to build and sustain? Teamwork is so beneficial at so many levels that it is almost impossible to list all of them. Within schools, there is a wide array of diversity with each student, and from personal experience, teaming with different people all the time builds a universal understanding and respect for different backgrounds and cultures. This is incredibly important in the world today with the wide range of diversity that should bear no barriers. Students are pushed in schools to learn new things, and often with team research and presentation work, new ground is broken, and new ideas are formed. With effective brainstorming, students collectively work to solve complex problems. Through this discussing and questioning, a comfortable environment is formed, where speaking up is a necessity. The ability to communicate across any barrier is a skill that will be valuable for a lifetime, and teamwork provides an abundance of it. During the duration of teaming, students must use critical thinking to plan and make many decisions. Decision making and problem-solving are around every corner both in and out of school. This great amount of mental activity is beneficial not only in success in school but in personal health. Being mentally active means a healthy mind, and it sharpens one’s mental abilities. This all is cognitive growth and is another important aspect of personal health that will have an everlasting impact. All habits developed from working with teams will mold characteristic development with others and become an all-rooted part of one’s personality. This again is another lifelong benefit that teamwork brings. From all of the above, when turned into effective action, the end result is far better than individual achievement. Teamwork carries over to the success and productivity of students in any given task. This transfer is the result of an increase in enthusiasm from the unity and interdependence that it brings.

2. Benefits of Teamwork

High quality decision making – With increased speed and many minds, progress can be very fast in a team. This does not mean that a team will always make good decisions. A team is only as strong as its leadership. With a good leader, a team will outshine an individually led team and with a bad leader, a team can head in a disastrous direction, away from the goal. If this does not happen, a team is likely to make better decisions than an individual when it comes to joint decision-making. It is qualitative rather than quantitative. This means a person must decide if a decision is good or bad, not if it’s right or wrong. For decisions of this nature, there is always the best one and the worst one. All things being equal, the decision is reversible and there is no known method. The best tool is to toss a coin. Often in an organizational environment, coin tossing is the method of decision. High-quality team decision-making requires a decision advocacy and decision inquiry phase. Open debate and dialogue between on the possible alternatives to a decision. This provides an opportunity to examine assumptions and inferences and to assess the effects of the decision on future tasks. Phase two tests the quality of the decision and the ability to do a U-turn if the team is heading in the wrong direction.

Reduction in cost – Though the time of others is being paid for, improvement in speed will generally lead to a saving. Doing something right the first time is a highly effective way to reduce cost. Completing something rapidly, and to a high standard also improves morale.

Increased speed – If you are part of a team, this is the most obvious benefit. Teams are built around specific tasks. If a team is in place to complete a task and a team has strong teamwork, this will bring a task to a close far more rapidly than under the guidance of one person. Many heads make light work.

Teamwork has the potential to underpin so much of what is valuable in work. Every organization is looking for ways to improve how it operates and delivers value. In this section, we are going to build a case for the value of teamwork. It can be used to really transform how a team or unit operates. We are often asked to ‘tell the business case for teamwork’. This may come from a leader of a team, a unit, or an organization who sees the value of teamwork and wants to articulate it in a simple compelling way. This example may also come from an ice breaker or as a part of more substantial training on communication. With this in mind, we have tried to boil it down to 10 clear reasons that, we hope, provide the answer to “Why is it important for you to build a team?”.

3. Challenges in Teamwork

In any team, problems will arise and team members need to find ways to solve it. Challenges may be created from the environment in which the team operates. An example of this is a financial constraint which is pressuring the team to complete the project earlier, thus cutting down the time to resolve the problem occurred. Differences in personal values about work may also be a challenge. In some countries a 3pm meeting means 3pm, and when a team member arrives at 3.30pm, it can cause conflict if other team members take it as a sign of disrespect. A big problem can arise from poor communication. If there aren’t consistent and clear communications between team members, no one really knows what they’re meant to be doing. This often results in duplication of effort, as two people may be working on the same thing but neither knows what the other is doing. This is often caused by lack of trust in the capabilities of other team members, leading to reluctance to inform others of the work being done. Time management and poor quality work is often a result of a lack of trust. Task delegation can also be a major source of conflict. People will often overestimate their capabilities or take on work they have no interest in, but know that nobody else will want to do it. If work is delegated forcefully or if the team member feels as if they are being treated unfairly, they may become hostile and this will often result in lack of effort on their behalf. This problem goes hand in hand with testing and competition between team members. This can take a positive form of increased efficiency and effort, however it often leads to conflict between team members as to which idea is superior or who should be working on the key tasks. This form of conflict can lead to a split in the team, which is the worst possible outcome and many teams fail to recover from it. An example of task competition and split in a team can be taken from the text “The Scorpion and the Frog” from Aesop’s Fables, where as two animals are arguing over whose idea is the way to cross a river, one ends up undermining the other and they both go their separate ways, failing their own objectives.

4. Strategies for Effective Teamwork

If your team has been less successful than you might have liked, or if you would like to make a good team even more effective, then developing and using a strategy is a very good idea. Of course, even before this point, some thought may need to be given to the type of team that is required and its purpose. For example, it might be that a project can be completed by one person working alone, but that it would be more effective, and more enjoyable, if two or three people worked together as a team. Then again, some tasks are repetitive and are done most effectively by a team, an assembly line process being an obvious example. A professional football team is a high profile and easily understood example of a concerted and coordinated team effort, but similar tactics are at the heart of the game play in many other sports. The first question that might be asked in relation to the game play of a team is exactly what it is that makes a good team superior to a mediocre one, or even a good individual. Presumably, teams are formed because people believe that togetherness is capable of achieving something more than the sum of individual efforts, so to be worthwhile a team must have the ability to do just that. But what is this mythical ingredient that is being sought? Clearly, we would say that a team has been successful if its task has been completed on time, on budget and to the required standard. Moreover, in doing this there should not have been too many sleepless nights for the team leader. In the best case scenario, team work should make the task more pleasant and more satisfying for all concerned. Consider doing a jigsaw puzzle on your own compared with doing it with a friend – the sense of achievement may be the same in both cases, but the second one is probably the more enjoyable and memorable experience.

5. Conclusion

With the lack of time and the large amount of ongoing work, a group from the University of Malaya requested a study to investigate the effectiveness of utilizing teamwork in the completion of an academic task. They hypothesize that a task completed in a group by utilizing teamwork will result in better results compared to a task completed individually. A scheduled survey was performed on 7 groups of students ranging from 1-5 in a group. The survey results show that 92.7% of students agree that utilizing teamwork is more effective compared to an individual task. This indicates that utilizing teamwork is an effective way to accomplish a task. With better results in task completion, teamwork is a method that must be implemented in all types of groups, small or large scale.

Unity within a team brings success to the team. The power of teamwork is concluded that a team must work together to achieve a goal. A single person cannot do as much as a team can. Teamwork is defined as “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable” (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993) (Gordon, 1997). Each team member puts in a lot of effort and time to complete a goal to the best of their ability. Through the time and hard work of each member, it changes an impossible task to a possible one. But the study was based on professional sports. The power of teamwork can be carried out through all types of situations, even a simple task like completing an assignment.