I read the article by Janet Kidd Stewart discussing the failure of teamwork (Womanews, July 5). As managing director of Management One Ltd., a company that works to successfully implement teams in an organization, I have seen far greater benefits from team organization than failures.
The reason that teams “don’t always work” is because they are not implemented properly rather than due to a fault in the system. The change in culture and job structure to move responsibility for results into the organization and away from the executive level requires training, guidance and nurturing. Too many companies send employees to a seminar, divide them into groups and expect them to efficiently function as a team. When the new system fails, they blame the system and not the method of implementation.
We have found that employees must be both trained in new skills and coached to successfully adopt a culture of empowerment, teamwork and responsibility for results instead of tasks. When employees quit renting their jobs from 9 to 5 and start owning them, the organization is poised to take off, regardless of gender, age or race.
Our experience is that the search for blame rather than solutions is much more prevalent in the top-down organizations than in a team-based organization that has been converted properly. As with anything in life, if you want it to work well, don’t look for shortcuts.
