Making teams work-how to get the most out of teamworking

Teamwork has become the management panacea for organisation ailments. The language of the sports coach has infiltrated the business environment to make us all develop teams-cross functional teams, virtual teams, project teams. The article exposes some simplistic myths and provides hard earned practical lessons in how best to tap some of the 70% of people´s capability typically unused by our major companies, through working together. It focuses on a particular project based UK defence/electronics company, which was faced with a downward trend in financial performance, driven by a cost plus consequence free culture and demotivated staff. The company had the potential to be world class, with technological capabilities second to none, and leadership in core markets. They needed a radical rethink of their ways of working, based on teams.