A preliminary talk with a customer often contains the question: What is it that makes a team? Is it sufficient that the people work together in some way or other? Is a unit of 25 employees a team? Isn’t the whole company in a way a team?
However banal this question may appear at first sight – it is essential to properly define the suitable from of personell development measure. For team development only really makes sense if the team real is a team.
What distinguishes a team? – I’d like to answer this question with the help of the analogy with a soccer team:
- a team has a common task and objective – in the case of a soccer team to score as many goals as possible in order to win
- the roles and tasks are clearly distributed – in the case of the soccer team there is the goalkeeper, defender, midfield player, and forward, all of them with a clearly assigned task to fulfil
- the team members are mutually dependent on one another – the forward can only score goals if the other team players do the preliminary work for him and pass the ball to one another
- each team member plays an active part in the solution of the task – in the case of the soccer team each player will possess the ball at certain times and so contribute to the result
- the team has a common responsibility for the final result – in the case of the soccer team it is in the end the final result / the common victory that counts
