Developing teams - Improving team performance
Efficient teamwork to perform temporary, interdisciplinary line and project tasks – whether the participants are experts for R&D, logistics, sales or distribution, whether they work within the factories or on global teams of employees – continues to be the primary way of working in large, complex organizations/companies, and one that largely determines competitive success. In the global business age, teamwork is often organized over large distances, and cooperation and decision-making structures as well as playing rules are designed across national and cultural boundaries. These virtual teams are managed remotely, posing new challenges for the responsible managers and team members.
Some typical problems/challenges:
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Teams cannot perform to the best of their ability if the individual members take a narrow view of their partial tasks instead of seeing teamwork as an integrated process.
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Teams can run into difficulties if they do not have a shared understanding of their objectives, and if there is no clarity about how tasks will be delegated and how responsibilities will be fulfilled at the interfaces.
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There is no basic understanding of the development phases for teamwork and the associated team dynamics and behaviors.
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Teams consistently suffer from a lack of communication. This results in badly coordinated, inefficient work processes, misunderstandings among colleagues and conflicts within the team.
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The team leader’s management style becomes a hindrance to good team performance.
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Teamwork becomes difficult because the team members’ cultural values and norms are different.
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"Remote" leadership of virtual teams across national borders, cultural boundaries and time zones is unsuccessful.
Our consulting approach
We work from a systematic perspective in the sense that we begin team-building and team development measures by asking whether the main goal is to train individual people (team leaders/members) or to train the team, as part of the organization and its interests, at the same time. In other words, the goal of our intervention is to ensure that the team members’ personal skills are used to help the team function more smoothly as a whole, to use the resources on the team as efficiently as possible, and to make sure the team is properly integrated into the organization’s work and decision-making structures and processes.
