Team Development

When it comes to teams, team development and getting teams to work together better, history has something to teach us.

“No man is an island entire of itself” wrote John Donne in the 17th century. Today he might not have made team development quite so gender specific but we get his drift. Every organisation needs talented individuals, but the real benefit of talented individuals is their role in a team. Teams are multi-talented and work when there’s trust, mutual appreciation and support.

Sometimes successful teams have an indefinable quality to them. You can’t tell why they work – they just do. And managers need to recognise that. There’s a nice story told in a book called Peopleware by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister. They recall a team in an IT company where one particular member didn’t seem to contribute very much and the management wanted to get rid of her. The rest of the team protested on the grounds that whatever it was she did, she made the team complete. Whenever she was part of a project, it was successful. When she wasn’t, it wasn’t.

We work with lots of organisations to facilitate and develop teams and the people within them. We help get things moving when teams get stuck or are facing change. Our clients are in the UK and around the world, from London to Hong Kong to Prague via Johannesburg.

So if your organisation would like their people to work together more cooperatively, or one of your existing teams seem to have hit the wall, you could pick up the defining book on team working the next time you’re passing through an airport. Or you could call or e-mail us to hear first hand of our experience and how we could deliver our practical approach to you.