Teamwork

Interpersonal Teamwork Skills

Interpersonal skills that enhance teamwork help members with conflict resolution, collaborative problem[Page 556] solving, and communication. Conflict resolution skills allow the team to understand conflict as a part of developing new ideas and strategies. Conflict resolution strategies call for fostering useful conflict in the form of divergent approaches to the group's work, while avoiding personal conflicts. Team members who have mastered this skill can distinguish the types of conflict and use tactics that help the group move toward win–win solutions.

Skills for collaborative problem solving include inviting and encouraging others’ ideas and suggestions, especially about ways of improving the team's work processes. Collaboration can require individuals to serve the interests of the whole group over their own ideas or interests. Unfortunately, collaboration takes more time and energy than more directive approaches. Team members can obtain training in methods of collaborative problem solving, such as consensus decision making.

Communication skills for teamwork focus on active listening, reinforcing others’ suggestions and ideas, and participating by offering constructive input to the group. Specific skills include paraphrasing others’ contributions, acknowledging teammates’ views, articulating ideas, identifying positive features of others’ ideas, probing for additional information and reasoning, observing and understanding nonverbal messages, and engaging team members in personal conversation about everyday matters.

Self-Management Teamwork Skills

Self-management skills conducive to teamwork concern many of the responsibilities traditionally assigned to supervisors before the spread of team-based organizations and self-managing teams. Self-management skills related to work evaluation include goal setting to meet team responsibilities and capabilities of receiving, interpreting, and acting on team performance feedback. Requisite skills include developing measures of performance, data collection, recordkeeping, charting, trend spotting, problem identification, problem solving, and action planning.

A second set of self-management skills concerns planning and coordination. Ideally, team members can take full responsibility for scheduling all members’ activities, including vacations, coverage of absences, overtime, assistance to other teams, and related logistics. Teamwork also depends on the members’ skills at balancing members’ workloads and managing internal cross-training, job coaching, job rotation, and asking for training or other outside help.

Self-management also requires meeting management skills. Ideally a team can conduct effective meetings that maximize the use of members’ time.

Manager's Role in Fostering Teamwork

Development and sustenance of teamwork calls for team managers to maintain an appropriate balance between directive and nondirective styles. If a manager takes a highly directive approach, as seen in some traditional hierarchies, team members may react by becoming passive and dependent. If, in contrast, a manager takes a completely nondirective or hands-off approach, team members may experience ambiguity about their responsibilities and might respond with unwelcome initiatives or with confusion and indecision. A manager can promote teamwork by providing a moderate amount of structure and support for self-management, including clearly defining roles and responsibilities, helping define team performance measures, providing assistance in obtaining training and resources, helping with conflict and diversity, and encouraging independent handling of the details of the work.

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