Managing for Accountability by Lynne Curry

Author:Lynne Curry [Lynne Curry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Business Expert Press
Published: 2021-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

Employees Benefit From Team

Employees enjoy the feeling of personal and professional support that being a team member gives, leading to increased job satisfaction and morale. Team members transfer insights, skills, and enthusiasm to each other. These increased psychological benefits lead directly to increased team member retention.

What Happens in Organizations That Lack a Sense of Team?

Organizations lacking a sense of team often consist of departmental silos or work groups that create problems for other work groups. Each silo develops its unique culture, with the buzzwords, needs, and priorities of each silo not easily understood or accepted by members of other silos.

Each work group’s focus on its own needs and priorities can result in unresolved problems for other work groups. In a construction company, “field” employees do not understand why the accounting department needs their paperwork completed “by 5,” when field workers cannot afford to set aside the “real” work that “pays all of our salaries,” and “payroll is automatic, isn’t it?” Frontline order takers fail to record crucial details, leaving those processing invoices spending hours backtracking to unravel messes. Service department employees want to wring the necks of sales team members who promise what cannot be done. The organization fails to function like a smoothly oiled machine, frustrating everyone involved.

Turf wars occasionally result, with employees dividing into camps and taking sides, siphoning off energy that could have been directed toward attaining organization goals. Duplication of work by departments that fail to communicate with other departments wastes payroll dollars. Employees forget they are part of one organization and criticize other departments to customers.

When the owner of a small construction company with revenues of $25M called me, he asked, “What exactly do you do? My friend runs a thriving multi-state architectural firm and said I need you.” I answered that I made companies more productive, asked him a dozen questions, and said, “I’d like to work with everyone in your company for an hour to ninety minutes. We’ll make sure each employee and work group understands what the other employees and work groups need from them.”

At first, he did not understand and asked, “You mean my lead guys?”

“I mean everyone.”

“What are we going to do again?”

I explained, and he said his guys were construction hands who would not sit for a lecture. I said, “I won’t be the one talking, they will.”

When I started the meeting, I explained that in any team sport, we count on our team members to step up to the plate and know the positions they play. During the meeting, each work group presented information to the others concerning their priorities and what they needed from the other work groups to do their best work. When one of the carpenters said, “Now it makes sense why you get so upset about the timecards,” the payroll team raised their fists in the air in celebration.

Three months later, the owner called and asked, “that worked, can you come back for another session?”

“Is field getting their timecards in on time?”

“Yes.”

The construction company continued to improve their teamwork and communications, and grew from $25M to $150M in revenue.

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