In your career as a university student, you will surely have worked in groups with your classmates, and you will have noticed how teamwork is able to maximize results by optimizing efforts. What is team working, then, and how can it lead an organization to achieve certain goals? Let’s see why teamwork is important and how to develop this important skill in the professional world.
The ability to work in a team is one of the soft skills most requested by companies today. So, don’t waste your time in college and learn how to work in a group, eventually, in your professional career, it might be crucial, even if it seems that your profession, let’s say an essay writer, doesn’t require being a team player.
Here’s how team building and strengthening group identity can help strengthen your business and improve productivity.
What Is Teamwork?
Let’s start our team working guide by trying to understand what it is and how this feature can be crucial in companies, but also your academic career.
Team working is essential to make a working reality a place in which to create mutual collaborations and establish relationships based on a spirit of solidarity. Without cohesion between colleagues, quarrels and jealousies can be fueled that hurt the organization and distance the team from achieving common goals.
The Concept Of The Group
To define the group concept, we use a simple but effective model: the 5 C model. In a close-knit group these 5 “Cs” must coexist:
- Complementary: Each part of the team has control over a certain part of the project. Everyone has complementary skills, all useful for carrying out the assigned work
- Coordination: each group, with the guidance of a leader, should act in an organized manner with the aim of moving the project forward, without ever entering into competition
- Communication: The ability to team working lies above all in the ability to communicate better between team members, listening to each other actively without overlapping
- Confidence: without trust, there can be no good job. Each team member must have full confidence in the other, putting team success before personal success
- Commitment: each team member must commit to giving the best of himself and make every effort to achieve common goals.
Teambuilding
To acquire team working skills and strengthen the team, a very important process is used in companies: teambuilding. Teambuilding consists precisely in building, step by step, an increasingly close-knit team, working on group dynamics.
This step is very important, especially if you are a recent graduate looking for a job: developing a predisposition to teamwork is very welcome by companies, whether small or large.
By teambuilding, we mean all those methodologies born and developed to work in groups and in particular on task-oriented work teams. Its activity focuses on the development of the distinctive skills of a company by creating a sense of identity for each member of the workgroup.
Let’s see now what all the steps are to take to strengthen the identity of a group and how you can behave to be an integral part of a team.
Promote Teamwork
What can be done to nurture team working at school or work? Let’s look at some of the possible activities and how you might behave to take advantage of all the opportunities.
- Issue a challenge: Your employer may issue a challenge and ask you to work as a team, setting common goals that can only be achieved with everyone’s efforts. How to behave? Take this opportunity by showing off your skills, but without being presumptuous or overwhelming others. Carry out your duties, listen to the team, and train your sense of empathy
- Result-oriented: your company may decide to work based on achieving a result. Work is no longer made up of tasks for their own sake, but of responsibilities aimed at reaching a specific goal. How to behave? If your company has this vision, but the goal to be achieved at the center of everything and coordinate with others to achieve it. Everyone must have their own tasks and a maximum time to finish them. If you need help from a colleague, don’t hold back: usually, the more you give, the more you get
- Promotion of learning: learning and knowledge are the most important principles for many companies. Courses to work better are important opportunities to take advantage of to get the best out of yourself and your colleagues. How to behave? Everyone has something to teach be like a sponge and absorb everything that can be useful to improve yourself from your colleagues. At the same time, don’t be stingy and share what you know with others. Mutual help is the best way to empower the team and grow professionally.