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Many of us feel different when we return to work from a break. If you come back with better ideas, more energy and more creativity, it may be because your way of working is out of balance, or perhaps you’re just working too hard.

Do you believe that the training courses you’ve done have been truly valuable? Do you use what you’ve learned in your everyday working life? Often people are dubious, if not negative, about the training they’ve done and the benefit to them. It is possible to make training stick, and have a lasting benefit.

Organisations are often tied to a teamwork ideology. It’s just ‘the way things are done’ and how we are socially trained to think – isn’t it? There are trends in society that may change the way we think, the most important being the Internet and its applications. ‘Two heads are better than one’ assumes that heads (people) hold information. Of course they do, but in today’s wired world, a big part of the information we use in our daily work has relocated from heads to networks. You can find information either online by using search engines, or via networks that people are more or less loosely connected to (such as Facebook, Wikipedia or LinkedIn).

The term team is used a lot in many different contexts, but it is rarely used accurately. The reason it is rarely used accurately is that to understand what a team really is you have to experience it. And experience of teamwork is sufficiently rare that few us have had it.

When a team reaches a certain size it begins to have a dynamic of its own, quite different from that of a loose group of individuals – and for managers it can seem as if the skills you’ve learnt about managing yourself, your work and your people, have deserted you.

Though not a fan of war, nor necessarily of the war in Iraq, I was shown this speech the other day, and was struck by the underlying courage, dignity and respect for humanity shown by the speaker, Lt. Col. Tim Collins, commander of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish, as he summed up the task for the British forces waiting to remove Saddam Hussein from power in March 2003…

‘Leaders are those that others choose to follow.’ However, I hope we aspire to more than ordinary leadership; I hope we aspire to great leadership. We might define great leadership as: ”enabling all those around you to do their best in pursuit of a common objective.”

Teamwork has become the default way of working in organisations. Many of us have a long-lasting romance with teams, yet we rarely stop and question the assumptions. Like breathing, we just do it. Is teamwork still a safe bet or is it ‘last century’?

How familiar are these situations? Your organisation adopts a new strategy. While paying lip-service to the change, key staff still resist the new direction, complaining and hoping that things will go back to the way they were.

All organisations need great team leaders; no leadership, no great organisation. Over the next three posts we will be answering the question, “How can I be a great team leader, and how can I produce leadership in others?”

Our definition of Leadership is: ‘holding the Vision, enabling Partnership, and empowering others to be Accountable’.