Escuela de Negocios y Desarrollo Gerencial

TECHNICAL ENGLISH
Lic. Rosmery Bermejo Medina.

GOOD TEAMS

A group organized to work together, this is how the dictionary defines "team". Simple isn't it? But
both in business and in other areas such as sports, "team" and "teamwork" takes on a whole
new meaning and is an area considered to be crucial to success.

Many famous people have given their opinion about teams and teamwork, for this article,
however, I have selected two for you:

Michael Jordon: "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships."

Henry Ford: "Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together
is success."

If teamwork is so important for success, we need to build teams. But what does team building
mean? It can mean building relationships, entertainment programmes, learning people skills,
leadership skills, leadership development, accelerating change, merging cultures, kicking off
new project teams, incorporating different methods or cultures, etc.

Now this sounds like it is nearly impossible to create a good successful team, so here are some
keys factors to create good teams:

 Real Team. - Just by naming a team does not mean that this team is a team, remember
the dictionary definition; a group organized to work together.

 Compelling direction for its work. - Setting good direction for a team means being
strict and insistent about desired results, but being equally insistent about not specifying
how the team should go about achieving those results, this is the team’s role.

 Structure that facilitates its development. - Like any organization - a team is a small
organization - a good structure that facilitates the workflow and decision making is crucial
to achieve positive results.
 Escuela de Negocios y Desarrollo Gerencial
TECHNICAL ENGLISH
Lic. Rosmery Bermejo Medina.

 Supportive organizational context. - There's no use in setting up a team if the

organization doesn't provide the support and means needed for the team to work.

 Expert teamwork coaching. - Now an expert in the area is always going to provide
valuable know-how that will increase the chances of success, but obviously we must be
sure that the results we intend the team to achieve makes contracting a coach worthwhile.

 Supportive organizational context. -There's no use in setting up a team if the

organization doesn't provide the support and means needed for the team to work.

 Expert teamwork coaching. - Now an expert in the area is always going to provide
valuable know-how that will increase the chances of success, but obviously we must be
sure that the results we intend the team to achieve makes contracting a coach worthwhile.

As we have mentioned before teamwork helps achieve good results, but teams don't always
work. There are obviously many reasons for this but here are three common ones:

 Ambiguous team membership. - Well designed teams learn quickly how to work well
together and they get better and better over time. But not if team membership is
ambiguous, their roles are not defined or there is much chopping and changing.

 Clear and challenging mission. - Failing to provide a clear, challenging, and

consequential direction for the team, providing them with only a small part of the mission
due to fear of negative results, normally will end up with an unsuccessful team.

 Large homogeneous teams. - Composing teams that are too large and too
homogeneous in membership is also very common. Large teams decrease the efficiency of
the team and although we all prefer to work with people who are similar to ourselves this
decreases the creativity of the group.

So, do you work in a team? I hope the few points I have highlighted here will help you think
and maybe help you to further indulge in this subject and improve your team's results.