Building and Leading your Business Team
Organizations usually group their people into teams according to the kind of tasks they need to do or responsibilities they have to take. These teams are often called departments led by their respective managers or supervisors. In big organizations where departments are made up of a large number of employees, breaking them down into a number of teams led by unit supervisors makes it easier for teams to achieve departmental goals.
Teams, no matter their size or the departments they belong to in organizations, need to function for the betterment of the entire business entity. Successfully achieving team objectives and the degree of productivity in their execution of team efforts determine how well motivated members are by their managers. However, the mindset of the teams does not only depend on how managers motivate them; there are other factors that crate mindsets that eventually affect team productivity as well.
Having a proactive mindset
Managing rival teams in the company is the ultimate job description of the CEO. A sensible way to deal with the us-versus-them adversarial mindset in self-absorbed teams is to foster a proactive bonding mindset. It is, by some injectable metaphor, akin to configuring say, a hosted VoIP PBX. You bring countless online phone networks together and make them connect to each other so as to serve one essential purpose: Connect customers to a system that attends to their phoned-in retail concerns.
A proactive mindset in teams actively looks for the common goal between them. This effectively eliminates any built-in adversarial mindset that teams bring into meetings or projects. In many ways it discourages the development of the desire to do tribal seeking- when the mind looks out for tribal behavior within teams that says “you’re either a friend or an enemy”.
The negative anticipation
Having a common goal or positive outcome anticipation about teams can also help employees in teams, or those managing them, to cope with adversarial mindsets that basically start off with negative anticipation towards other teams. The ideal state for finding creative solutions happens more when teams bond with each other on the proactive level, and when team objectives are put into proper context with regards to how they could contribute to the whole business entity’s well-being.
It is but natural for teams to be motivated along negative anticipation premises. Team members do not find it unusual for their managers to urge them to perform “better” than the other teams. This kind of talk ought to be taken only in the context of the typical team pep talk. Proactive bonding enables teams to view other teams not as obstacles but as ways to identify bridges.
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