You just received the memo at work: your company is restructuring. In an effort to open up internal communication and take thinking “outside the box,” they are regrouping departments into Task Oriented Teams. You hang your head in despair. Your experience working in a team is from college English when another freshman’s lack of grammar skills nearly ruined your grade.
The concept of the task oriented team is based on a nonprofit committee structure. The idea is to blend departments into teams of two or more people and give them one project to focus on. The theory is communication will suddenly open up and everyone will perform better. While this is a good theory and can work, it also has great potential to de-structure employee moral. But there are ways to avoid the pitfalls of teams. First, you need to address the positives and negatives.
A team or committee structure promotes debate and discussion. Within this sort of structure one or two people will bid for power. They will assert themselves to become leaders of the group and the project in order to obtain the most credit when the work is done. Women, though natural communicators, often find this transition into a team environment stressful and difficult. While we are communicators we can also be passive. We want the team to work smoothly. We don’t want any hurt feelings, and we do not want to impose on any one individual.
Though it is true a team is only as strong as its weakest individual, it is up to the other members to keep that link from breaking.
Pros:
- Better Communication of ideas between departments and among many individuals. Most teams are blended from several departments creating a mix of everyone from finance to tech to marketing.
- Better problem solving. Technical questions get answers right away.
- Division of labor. Tasks and projects get finished sooner creating a higher turnover rate and more profits for the company.
- Commissions can be larger because total project size grows with the more individuals working on it.
Cons:
- Power struggles arise among members of the team. Because of those power struggles communication can become stalled or stopped altogether. Duplication of efforts often accrues when one individual does not trust the other to accomplish the task.
- Some work may be done below acceptability. The work then has to possibly be redone by another member of the team.
- If the structure of the company once revolved around territories there may be some protective emotions if someone feels the other members are invading his or her territory.
- If the project is connected to a raise, bonus or promotion instead of inspiring the team members the company has just created a race to the finish. This causes secrecy, manipulation and deception to emerge.
So, the way to survive your team and strengthen all the links is to keep the lines of communication open. An easy way to promote communication is to set up a list of contact information. Keep in mind if the team has more than two members, more than likely they have never met and have no idea who the other individuals are.
Make sure when tasks are assigned they are assigned to the right people. Only individuals qualified for the particular task should be assigned to it. It would be inappropriate to assign a budget report to a technology professional. You also wouldn’t want the finance professional handling media contacts. These roles are not mixed in a traditional environment, don’t mix them in a team.
This leads to the next pitfall, assigning work evenly. Not everyone is going to have the same amount of work in the project. There are going to be one or two people with more work than others. Don’t try to keep feelings from being hurt by assigning a task to an unqualified member simply to keep the numbers even. Respectively, if you are the person with the most work don’t take it personally.
Keep a running list of the tasks and who is accomplishing them. Doing so will keep from work being duplicated.
Meet often and keep the meetings short. Once a group meets for more than an hour, patience is lost and communication breaks down. A 15- to 20-minute meeting every morning will help keep the group on task without straining relationships.
Carbon copy all emails to everyone in the group. Make sure all the members of your team know what’s going on. Just communicating between one or two individuals leave the rest in the dark.
If a commission or monetary reward is tied to the successful completion of the task, be sure it is distributed evenly among the members of the team. It may seem unfair to give an even amount to everyone when even work was not performed, but doing so will prevent a power struggle from arising.
There can be many unseen individual benefits to restructuring into teams. If you apply good communication strategies right from the start the transition will go smoothly and the knot in your stomach will loosen. So when you get the memo dive in head first and enthusiastically because it doesn’t have to mean the end to your sanity. Survival is possible.