The benefits of teamwork among animals and athletic events can be fairly spectacular, but teamwork in your situation can also offer tremendous benefits and rewards. Working as a team member will help you expand your job skills, earn greater success at work, enjoy increased recognition, gain leadership experience, be available for advancement and promotion — and ultimately receive more compensation for results! All these benefits — rewards — are made possible through teamwork because T.E.A.M. literally means:
Together
Everyone
Achieves
More
When a team works effectively and efficiently, everyone wins — you, your teammates, the customers, the organization’s shareholders, and the employer. A successful team is truly an example of synergy — that is, accomplishing more as a team than you could by working alone. It’s been said that, “Teams are the way ordinary people do extraordinary things.”
Why does effective teamwork lead to progress, increased productivity, and greater success? Effective teamwork leads to improved results because teams are able to apply the collective knowledge, skill, experience, power, creativity, and insight of everyone on the team to accomplish a given goal. Ken Blanchard says pointedly, “None of us is as smart as all of us.” Everyone working together saves time, limits mistakes, and reduces waste.
When you analyze the power of teams, you can see that effective teamwork:
- Enables team members to build new skills and reach their greatest individual potential
- Focuses team members’ collective knowledge and skill into a powerful force to accomplish a specific job or goal
- Facilitates quick, clear, and continual communication
- Boosts the performance level in every area of the job to be done
- Increases the bottom line of the entire organization
The word “teamwork” appears everywhere; it is increasingly becoming an integral, dynamic part of business, family, charitable organizations, sports and recreation. The concept of working together as a finely-tuned team is recognized as important to success in any endeavor. Unfortunately, organizing into a team is no guarantee of success. If teams aren’t always successful, it may be because timeproven principles of teamwork were not applied effectively. Or it could also mean the task or goal did not lend itself to teamwork. Teams are not the solution or answer to every problem. Sometimes hard decisions have to be made by management because there isn’t time to develop a team, or the nature of the task or goal is not appropriate to assign to a team. But generally, teamwork is a win-win approach. Teams may not all succeed, but teamwork always does!
Individuals and organizations are discovering that if applied wisely the practice of teamwork can bring greater success and satisfaction in all realms of achievement — personal and professional.
LMI Journal
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