(Jornadas Regionales)
A multidisciplinary approach of group dynamics allows to evaluate new aspects of success generated by team working. In this case, sports are an excellent example to outline their main characteristics.
To consolidate actual working teams is one of the most important challenges for a company. During one of the lectures given within the Regional Conference on Super-marketing , Bibiana Crocitta – a licentiate who leads the Selection and Search Division of BC & Asociados - approached the subject from the angle of sports, by considering them a good example to outline the difference between a working team and team working:
“The new scenario, strongly inclined towards change, requires both a high level of training as well as the development of capacities to make group work more professional and to identify ways to generate better working techniques.”
The possibility of counting on competent working teams will add a further value and will be an essential tool to facilitate communication processes, meeting objectives and identifying internal policies of each organization. Even if reaching these conclusions may seem obvious and simple, to shape up a genuine team is, in practice, a difficult task.
Group dynamics brings along a multidisciplinary approach, and it is important to leave behind the business area to visualize important aspects that will favour our idea of team work. Sports as a discipline, and particularly football, are an excellent example to outline the characteristics of team work.
What special attribute should a company have to make others see all its members interacting passionately?
At present, where improvements are ongoing, and where changes themselves are the only elements that remain constant, the option would be to propose a recipe for team building. This proposal tends to analyse team working from an open and flexible point of view, to build up a true interaction with the team, valuing its advantages, and considering it as an integrated means to achieve a goal.
A team is built up from the need to attain a goal or an objective, within a certain period of time, where members should develop their competences in the best possible way, but also contributing with their colleagues in order to achieve each and every team objectives.
Action orientation
A football player trains daily in order to achieve the best possible performance, but on the field he needs to be complemented by his partners so that the game has a favourable result.
Professional players get day after day a physical and tactical training and, in addition, they concentrate together to attain their best condition when they face their opponent, and help define the game no sooner, no later.
From this point of view, team work is not the addition of individual production but instead the permanent interaction of its members.
Furthermore, this implies that each member perceives the importance of becoming a multi hat resource within his/her team, a talent required for the ongoing development and training of the different roles played by each member.
In football, if a player gets suspended or hurt, it is usual to see a change in roles: the fore player becomes defender or vice versa, automatically modifying the operation of the team.
Thus, it is important that each member takes over his or her objective assessment and strengthens his/her self criticism and interest for further training.
The disposition for intensive training as well as an individual and group evaluation, will favour a better development of the team.
The presence of a leader
What guidelines should be considered to shape up a better team?
Surely we must find the most capable person for each position; however, this does not guarantee the constitution of a winning team. It is possible that the cornerstone that will help us get closer to a good result should be the incorporation of a leader.
The presence of a leader is one of the basic keys to facilitate work.
In turn, football successful teams always count on the support of a coach outside the limits of the football field and of one inside its limits, what helps them attain their objective.
The combination of a thinking leader (from the outside) and an executing leader (from the inside) produces a true leader. In my opinion, it is not possible to combine in a single person the roles of a genuinely strategic leader and those of a genuinely action- oriented one: it looks too “Quixotic”.
“This is why when we say that the problem of an organization is the absence of leaders, in fact we should wonder what type of a leader we have and what type we actually need. Or maybe we may conclude that what we need is to have two leaders”.