Teamwork: The Third Key to Building Quality

By Enrique Bekerman

Teamwork is an essential part of doing business these days. The team approach should be engrained in your organization's culture so that every employee understands his role as a contributor towards the betterment of the Company.  Team participation can take many forms such as executive teams, management teams, Quality Circles, cross-functional groups, problem solving teams, project teams, Six Sigma teams, etc.

Today business leaders agree that the only way to survive in our competitive world is by obtaining full customer satisfaction through the consistent delivery of high quality products and services.  Teams' efforts should then be directed at obtaining customer satisfaction at all levels of the firm.

Teams at the executive level are focused on bringing the firm's long term strategy into a closer fit to the customer needs and wants. Should the company establish partnerships or alliances to provide new products and services to its client base and therefore expand its revenues? Should the Company enter a new market to expand its customer base? The executive team is doing its job when all these decisions are studied with a focus on the customer.

At the operational level, all team leaders should work as a close team in delivering the types of products and services that the customers really want. This requires close communications within the company and with the customer. This implies that barriers between departments should be essentially eliminated so that the decisions that prevail are those that benefit the firm as a whole, and that usually is what benefits the customer, as well.

On the shop floor or service call center, a number of different types of teams have been used. With an experienced workforce, there is no doubt that good management practice dictates that employees be included in any effort to improve operations as they know their jobs better than anyone else.

So, improvements in Quality and Productivity are achieved more quickly with the involvement of the employees doing the actual work. In order to gain the most benefits out of the team, members should be trained on problem solving methods.

Today, no one doubts that teams are valuable in the conduct of business. The question usually is, how effective are they in the real world? One major pitfall of any kind of team effort is the lack of top management support.

Top management needs to stay in touch with team project goals and accomplishments and provide the resources needed to provide guidance and coordination to the teams. Often team efforts are considered as part of a discrete program rather than a new way of doing business. The team efforts are then judged strictly on the basis of financial rewards contributed. If the financial rewards are not immediate, the concept of teamwork is often discarded.

Given enough time, however, the organization as a whole would benefit from teamwork and many of the benefits will be concrete financial rewards in addition to such intangible benefits as highly motivated and work-invested employees.

It has become customary to refer to four levels of team development as forming, storming, norming, and performing. Each stage has its own challenges, which need to be addressed in order to assure the effectiveness of the team.

The team is first formed and the charter is explained and goals are set. The team then starts spending energy on understanding the issues and naturally conflicts arise (storming). As the team starts to learn how to deal with some of the natural frustrations and conflicts it enters the norming phase. The final phase (performing) arises when the team zeroes in on the issues and their solutions.

Effective teams take advantage of everyone's ability and diversity. Members with different intelligence, talents and work experiences all have something to contribute.

Team effectiveness can be measured at the various stages by testing to determine:

1) if a shared vision exists,

2) if the goals and member roles are clear,

3) if conflicts are being resolved in a fair manner,

4) if meetings are being held in an effective manner,

5) if members are being recognized, and

6) if the team effort is being supported.