Unit 4. Teamworking

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” (Henry Ford)

“Teamwork divides the task and multiplies the success.” (Unknown)

Speaking Answer the questions:

1. What is your understanding of Teamworking?

2. What are the most important things to consider when working in a team?

3. How would you ensure a cooperative effort from all team members?

4. What contributes to good team spirit / effective team working?

5. Give an example of how you organised yourself and your team to deliver a project or initiative that impacted beyond your own department.

6. What experience do you have of working in a team?

Vocabulary practice Complete the article using the words below.

Goals, team player, team, committed, deadlines, facilitator, meetings, co-ordinating, informative.

Teamwork is the concept of people working together cooperatively as a _____ in order to accomplish the same______. Professionalism and efficiency are often measured in terms of how good one is as a______ _____. Successful teams accomplish their objectives because they are ________, respect the various roles within the team and meet their_______. Teams spend a large part of their working lives in_________. It is therefore important to make sure that every meeting is positive, and __________ a necessary use of the team's time. The ________ plays a key role in ________ the team's work andkeeping everyone focused at meetings.

Reading Read the text.

Glossary: tedious – boring

hog the floor – dominate the discussion

scepticism – doubting the truth of what other people say

mould – form

Meeting techniques

“Too many meetings are a waste of time.”

What do corporate leaders do all day? Much of their time is spent in meetings. No wonder: the rules of team­working are established in meetings, which in turn are the basic building blocks of corporate existence. However, meetings might not always be the best use of the team's time.

Meetings, like teams, do not neces­sarily achieve what they set out to do. One recent study in America by con­sultants Synectics found that senior and middle managers spent more than three-quarters of their time in meetings.

On average, only 12 per cent of man­agers thought their meetings were pro­ductive. In high-performing companies, that figure rose to 25 per cent and in the lower performers it dropped to 2 per cent.

“Despite it, we all go to more and more of them,” reflects Jonathan Day of McKinsey. But there must be a way to make them work. They can't all be a waste of time. Perhaps team leaders should do everything they can to make sure they organise them properly. Indeed, running meetings well is clear­ly an art, and a growing number of companies (including Synectics, which modestly claims to run the best meet­ings in the world) are offering help. Lots of meetings, of course, happen in the corridor or around the coffee machine, and those are probably the most efficient sort, because they tend to be spontaneous, small and quick. Bigger ones are usually more problematic, and team members have to put up with meetings where too little thought goes into the agenda, the location, the peo­ple asked to attend and the outcome, say those who try to improve them. That allows unimportant ideas or tedious individuals to hog the floor, with the result that a lot of team mem­bers find it hard to look forward to the next meeting.

Meetings tend to be held either to share information or to solve problems. For the first sort, Roger Neill of Synectics advocates asking all the par­ticipants to say at the end what they think they have heard, and correcting their accounts if they are wrong. With problem-solving, the aim ought not to be just brainstorming and coming up with ideas but also paying proper attention to putting solutions into prac­tice. He also thinks it is wise to ask peo­ple what they liked about the things they heard; criticism usually comes unasked. Pessimism, scepticism and challenge all cause trouble.

What makes meetings especially important to companies, though, is that this is where teams are moulded. That is why companies must learn how to run them. David Bradford, a professor at Stanford Business School, who spe­cialises in studying teams, argues that meetings often waste huge amounts of time: in one business, the executive team spent three meetings designing business cards. Of course, one person should have done this before the team started working together. The way to get a good decision is to frame the ques­tion carefully. If you want to invest in China, do not announce that you are planning to do this, or ask the meeting whether you should. Instead, enlist your colleagues’ help by saying: “We want to be in the Chinese market: how do we get there?”

Read the text again and answer the questions.

1. Why team leaders should do everything to organise the meeting properly?

2. What are the two main reasons for holding meetings?

3. What happens when meetings are not properly organised?

4. Why meetings are so important for companies?

Match the words with their definition

Teamwork	an observable and measurable end result having one or more objectives to be achieved within a more or less fixed timeframe.
Goals	The process of working collaboratively with a group of people, in order to achieve a goal.
Teambuilding	Someone who helps a person or organization to find a solution to a problem.
Facilitator	Ability to identify and motivate individual employees to form a team that stays together, works together, and achieves together.
Brainstorming	a way of developing new ideas, through a discussion in which several people make lots of suggestions and the best ones are chosen.
Agenda	the process of finding solutions to problems.
Problem-solving	all the things that need to be done or that need to be thought about or solved.

Listening Listen to two members of a team in a meeting. Identify five more sentences to add to the list (а-f) above and indicate which qualities they correspond to.

1. They are active listeners.

2. They praise and encourage other team members’ work.

3. They have an optimistic and positive attitude.