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If you’re operating within a team or contributing to a situation, you have to speak up. You have to ask questions, even at the risk of sounding stupid, and challenge ideas or practices that don’t seem to be delivering on the objectives. If you feel uncomfortable or unclear, it’s your responsibility to sort it out, not anyone else’s. And it’s not OK to keep quiet and then complain about something afterwards.

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).

Look at job descriptions in almost any organisation, and you’ll find they’re broad statements of areas of responsibility or maybe lists of activities. Job descriptions like this are concerned with activity rather than output, and fuel the culture of ‘hard work’ and long hours. What you don’t see is a short, complete list of the results you are accountable for producing.

…and they might actually cost you and your business less. Imagine you hired a meetings fairy. The fairy’s job would be to ensure that meetings were short, efficient and effective.

Most important work in organisations does not involve an individual creating something from nothing. Most often it involves individuals and groups working together. So why is it so very unusual to see individuals and groups working really harmoniously together? And why do some groups stop collaborating with other groups, preferring to spend most of their energies finger-pointing the other group? Same question with individuals?

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.

What do you understand by ‘team development’? Here are some of the answers we get when we’re talking to the business managers and directors who are our prospective clients. They say:”Oh we do a lot of team development. We go out for a big meal together every month. In fact we’re going out for one next week.”

Do you find yourself saying ‘we’re like family’? What’s the problem with that? Well, being ‘one big happy family’ is not the way to run a business that is durable, that provides a satisfying environment for people to work in and that is financially stable and sound.

What many managers miss when they take on leading is that a team of people takes on a life of its own, quite distinct from the one on one relationships that random groups of people have. And it’s at this point that many managers suddenly feel as the spider must feel when too many flies land on the web at once!

Do you get confused over the distinction between ‘doing’ the job, ‘managing’, and ‘directing’? Here are some distinctions: Doing: Carrying out a deed or action, especially when held responsible for it. Managing: Getting people together to accomplish goals through interpersonal relations, information processing and decision making…