Tales from the Corporate Frontline

A Tale of Two Teams

This article relates to the Team Dynamics competency, which evaluates interpersonal communication, cooperation, and productivity between members of a single team, group, or department within your organization. In today's marketplace, in order for organizations to operate efficiently, it is essential that they understand how to create and utilize effective work teams at all levels of the organization. When well managed, teams improve productivity, innovation, and the likelihood of success. Ineffective teams lead to frustration and the loss of time and productivity. Evaluating this competency can be very useful if your organization is experiencing missed deadlines or low productivity levels.

This short story, A Tale of Two Teams, is part of AlphaMeasure's compilation, Tales From the Corporate Frontlines. It illustrates the importance of open membership and volunteer participation in supplying new ideas and keeping team motivation fresh and vital.

Anonymous Submission

The company where I work is very team-oriented. There are research teams, planning teams, safety teams, project teams, for just about any company function, there's a team assigned to ensure success.

These teams are easy to join - just show up at one of the meetings, and you're in. Volunteer to take charge of a task, and you become a team leader. In my experience, this system works quite well, and participation is voluntary.

A good example is our employee activities team. In a single year, this team arranged an employee picnic, six benefit raffles for local charities, a holiday gift program for needy local children, 4 book sale fundraisers, and three Red Cross blood drives. The team is never short of new members, and all events are very profitable.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Vision Builders Team. It was the brainchild of our corporate parent, and all team members were draftees. Each manager selected a chosen few, based on the total population of their department. Initiation included an expensive weekend at a full service resort, dinner and drinks included. At the seminar, the group was divided into smaller teams - again involuntarily. Each team was given a different corporate issue to investigate, for example: sales policies, customer service, or marketing. The team's job was to evaluate company performance in the assigned area and develop new procedures or suggestions for refining the existing ones. The perfect setup, it appears - engineered teams, made to feel "special" within the company, composed of the most motivated employees available.

Which team was more successful? Well, the Vision Builders Team was disbanded little more than a year after it began, after considerable effort and a great deal of expense. Some interesting ideas were floated, some of them successfully implemented, but the team died out due to lack of motivation. What started out as a stellar concept was brought down to earth quickly by lack of new blood and new ideas.

As for the Employee Activities team, it's still going strong. Plans are underway for the summer picnic as well as the quarterly fundraisers. There is discussion of an employee health fair. New hires volunteer for membership every week.

For teams to remain productive for any length of time, they need a supply of new ideas, often from new, voluntary members.

Measure. Report. Improve your organization with AlphaMeasure employee surveys.

Josh Greenberg is President of AlphaMeasure, Inc.

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