How to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Teamwork
Teamwork makes the dream work — an oft-used saying suggesting how effective collaboration allows two people or a team to realize their collective goals with a project. While people with multiple skill sets are admirable and possess flexibility, their skills are rendered meaningless if they cannot work well within teams. Every employee and employer relies on someone in some capacity to succeed. The strongest performing organizations achieve consistent success because they realize the importance of collaboration and its contribution to productivity.
Especially during the pandemic, employees see the benefit of collaboration, with a stark increase in the usage of collaboration tools to help remote teams function in their respective environments. However, whether remote or in-person, it can be challenging to get a group of individuals with contrasting personalities and motivations to work in unison. Figuring how to get different people on the same page is the key to realizing the biggest goals, both on an organizational and individual level.
Teamwork Facilitates Unity and Motivation
Achieving bigger goals requires high motivation and a unified cause that all employees can believe in. Leaders know how much motivation contributes to organizational success and employee engagement remains a pertinent issue, with statistics showing the increased effort being made to consistently engage employees worldwide. Leaders working harder to make employees feel comfortable, in conjunction with creating a harmonious work environment among colleagues, jolts motivation levels and sets a foundation for companies to achieve major goals.
Strong work culture also increases unity and eliminates unhealthy competition. Individual employees possess different skills, characteristics, communication styles, and work habits. If leaders don’t stress a team-first environment, many challenges arise with employees focused on boosting their achievements while competing against their colleagues — healthy competition within teams works, but only if colleagues are motivating each other to be better. Unhealthy competition sees employees put self-interests before team success, compromising organizational efficiency. The right principles of teamwork allow all contrasting employee traits to connect well, ensuring all shared goals are met while also accelerating personal development.
Making the Bigger Picture Easier to See
Bigger goals require a bigger picture, but it’s hard to get there in one go. Having S.M.A.R.T goals helps to break down your bigger goals into smaller, actionable and concrete markers so you can reach there in the timeliest way possible. Leaders should plan milestones at each stage of the journey towards achieving the bigger picture, outline all the necessary steps and clearly define the roles each team member has in understanding the big picture perspective.
Team members should have clear expectations and know what their contributions should be, so there are no misconceptions about workloads and roles that potentially add burdens to the process. The more you break down larger goals, the easier it will be for teams to piece things together and realize the biggest goals.
Aligning Individual and Team Goals
As mentioned earlier, every employee, while entrenched in achieving the team cause, will have individual goals they seek to achieve to further their careers and become productive members of an organization. To perfectly blend individual motivations with team ideologies to achieve bigger goals in an organization, leaders must take time with each team member to discuss how his or her work impacts the team’s work.
Each team member willing to make more significant contributions should be encouraged to be innovative in how he/she elevates their skills to blend with the team’s bigger goals. Or, if those elevated skill sets don’t fit with the team in question, explore other teams where you believe the team member’s abilities best fit. Teamwork works at its best organically, not when forced.
Information Should Always Flow
Communication greatly enhances employee retention and trust. Plus, team recognition for the work and achievements done to achieve key goals increases profits by nearly 30%. It’s vital for team leaders to not only encourage team members to establish open, honest communication mechanisms but for leaders to reassure their teams that their contributions matter.
Information should always be flowing throughout the whole team, with optimized feedback and reporting mechanisms in place to ensure teams stay on target. Project management and collaboration teams to information sharing purposes help while determining the best meeting points allow for teams to congregate at the most important, convenient times to ensure the path to achieving bigger goals is clear.
Teamwork helps organizations realize their dreams, and individuals feel more valued and connected. Leveraging teamwork is the weapon that helps organizations shoot for bigger goals with unwavering confidence.
Complete agreement! I used to get ribbed (and the jokes still do pop up about it )regarding a habit I have of saying "We must all work together, not against each other"
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