Teamwork in the Making

Bryan Carmichael
Dec 28, 2020
6 min read

Note: This is the fifth article of a new series I'm writing titled In the Making. If you enjoyed this article be sure to check out the previous four articles and stay tuned for all future articles.

Introduction

What skill does society teach us during pre-school? What skill is so important that they teach it to us before we even start to experience real education? Teamwork. Social skills. Bonding. Because connections make the world go round.

I will explain in detail why we need teamwork and social skills in our lives and how to develop said skills so that we can become social leaders.

Why is Teamwork so Important?

Why is it? Teamwork and cooperation grant three simple merits. Communication, compromise and leadership. These qualities are so important when it comes to successful teams in projects, events and competitions. They are also important solo traits to have when interacting with others.

Communication

This skill is fundamental to not just big teams, but small ones as well. I’ll use the example of dating. Say you’re dating someone, and this person doesn’t like communicating with you. This person doesn’t talk to you, text you, call you or engage in decisions with you. The relationship would start to get a little lopsided. You would be opening up to your partner while your partner remains silent.

This causes a power imbalance in the relationship as your partner now has more knowledge on how to beat you than you do for your partner in case of a dispute. You would also likely get suspicious as to what your partner may be hiding from you, and you have every reason to believe so. If your partner isn’t opening up about anything, that’s usually a sign that there’s something that your partner doesn’t want you to know. This person for all you know could be cheating on you, or secretly hate you, or secretly be married, etc. You wouldn’t have a clue.

In order for a healthy relationship to flourish, there needs to be the right amount of communication from both you and your partner. Not only will this allow the relationship to flow better (making decisions, going on dates, etc.), it would also establish more trust between the two of you and ensure that nothing terribly bad happens to the relationship.

Compromise

Compromising is hugely important when it comes to teamwork. The understanding that everyone in your team has ideas and you won’t always have it 100% your way. Choosing the best idea of everyone’s ideas is hard, but compromising allows a team to combine the best parts of multiple ideas and make a new idea out of them.

Being able to listen and realise that other people have good ideas too is challenging for some, but nonetheless an extremely important concept to learn. Compromising is also important because it lights the path to other qualities such as compassion and empathy.

For example, putting it in crude terms, driving along a road with nowhere to go and coming up to a fork, I want to drive right but my buddy in the passenger seat wants to go left. If we bickered about it, we would end up driving off the road and into the bushes by the ditch. On the other hand, if we compromised and agreed to turn right (doing it my way) and listen to his preference on the next turn, then we would still be on the road going somewhere. We could set up a system of alternation where every other decision would be made by myself and the remaining decisions to be made by my buddy. This way, we would be driving smoothly along the road for miles. Everyone’s happy and our car journey is smooth the rest of the way.

Leadership

Every team needs a leader, and that leader can be anyone in the team. The best leaders however, are the ones who can bring the team together and give out the best result. Team leaders need to be passionate, bold, and a good team player. He needs to hold the team together, especially in times of argument or stress.

A good team leader is able to get the group to listen to his instructions. Not in terms of content, but in terms of execution. He is the one that initiates group discussions, division of workload and the one who helps those struggling catch up.

It is self explanatory enough that I won’t give an example, I will instead give a tip to those who wish to become better leaders: remember who it is that gets the job done. It isn’t yourself, it’s the people you influence; your team members. Being the leader doesn’t make you most important, it makes you the most responsible. You have to take the fall for the team if necessary, however with a good team and your good leadership, that shouldn’t be a concern.

Where is Teamwork Applied?

Events. Competitions. Projects. Movements. Social gatherings. Personal interactions. Basically anywhere that involves two or more people. When I say ‘team’, people tend to think of big groups working together to achieve a common goal, but you can also have small teams of two or three people working together to achieve a common goal.

Remembering that these teamwork skills can be applied anywhere throughout daily life, from something as small as a conversation to as large as a social movement, teamwork is applied everywhere, even when you don’t consciously think about it.

For example, with COVID-19, we as a global community have had to work together to combat the spread of the virus, while we don’t know most of the people we’re working with and we certainly aren’t in contact with them, we all work together towards defeating the virus knowing it will benefit everyone and the greater good. We all must do our part to ensure the virus is contained, which is teamwork in itself, doing your part of the work and trusting others to do the same.

How do we Build Teamwork?

The standard recommendation to build cooperation between a team is to have them go through a series of team building exercises together. However, there’s actually an even simpler way to do it.

In a team of your choice

If you get to choose the team, the secret is straightforward. Pick good teammates. Pick people you know you would work well with, or people that you know would work well with the subject at hand.

For example, in a sports team, you would pick your best players. Alternatively, you would pick players that work well together to boost team chemistry. This is how player combos and tactics are formed.

If you happen to pick a bad teammate who either drags the team down or drags yourself down, either give them more space to figure out what’s going wrong, or talk to them and try to help them do better. That’s part of the leadership aspect.

In a team outside of your choice

The secret to good teamwork is not in your teammates, but in yourself. How well do you see yourself working together with these people? You can’t change the way your teammates work and act, you can only change your attributes towards them.

For example, if one of your teammates makes a mistake, oftentimes we would mark them as the screwup, the liability. This is due to the fact that we don’t know a lot about their strengths and weaknesses, so we assume their abilities based on what we’ve seen of their performance. This is very inaccurate as we all have different strengths and weaknesses in different areas of skill.

In order to avoid this, we must change our perceptions of people we don’t know so well.* Instead of marking our teammates down for their mistakes, we should mark them up for their achievements. This is why teachers (or at least the better ones) are very encouraging towards their students, because it not only helps the students do better, it also subconsciously passes on the message of encouragement into their students’ minds so that in the future they too will encourage those around them to do better.

Conclusion

That is my crash course on teamwork. Takeaways? Communication, compromise and leadership, the three basic elements of a good team. Picking good teammates and helping those who need it, basic strategy to form a good team. Encouragement and open perceptions of teammates we don’t know so well, best strategy to connect a not-so-well acquainted team.

If everyone is moving forward together, then success will take care of itself.

Henry Ford

*For more information on different perceptions of people we don’t know, you can read my articles How can we trust what we see and hear? and Transparency and the Friends Fallacy. Alternatively, you could read the book by Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know.