Time to Create Sound Teamwork by Diane Bandow - Essay Example

Building unity and a strong team ethic becomes even more difficult when employees are from diverse cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. 

A seasoned manager would then try to answer the question: ‘How can teams be supported more effectively?’ In trying to answer this question, managers will have to look into many areas of the organization, including “organizational culture, managers and management practices, policies, procedures, work practices, reward systems, resources, task parameters, types of people assigned to teams, etc”. (Bandow, 2001, p.42)  While some of these parameters are easy to work on, instilling a sense of trust is a much more challenging task.  The concept of structured trust is particularly relevant to creating sound teamwork: “standardized processes, contracts, and other verbal and written agreements can all serve as forms of structured trust, and managers can facilitate teams to help establish trust structures.” (Bandow, 2001, p.42)

Bandow goes on to list more questions that managers need to answer as a way of building sound teamwork.  The next of these questions is ‘How can team members separated by distance work together better?’  As per the allusion made before, this question assumes special significance in the age of Information and Communication Technology and financial globalization.   It is not unusual for teams to work across different countries or continents differentiated by contrasting sets of values and cultures.  For example, in North America, teams tend to focus straight away on the task at hand and don’t spend time building relationships with team members.  This tendency can prove counter-productive in the long run, as team members develop and propagate their negative experiences to workers down the line.  For example, counter-productive patterns like withholding information in meetings fear of being professionally harmed by other team members, uncertainty in their own abilities, etc.

Since at least 12 to 18 hrs are needed to establish trust in face-to-face interactions, teams that are geographically spread across the need to put in extra effort in building team ethics.  Teams “whose members are separated by distance have consistently recommended an initial face-to-face meeting where all rules, responsibilities, roles, expectations, deadlines, and parameters are clearly defined”. (Bandow, 2001, p.42)  And experienced managers can tell good effective relationships that work in a mutually beneficial manner when they see one.  And finally, other key questions that managers should set about answering satisfactorily pertain to resolving issues within teams and improving team performance.  Conflicts within teams can drag down the overall performance of the team.  Being cognizant of this fact, managers will have to consider “different interpretations of expectations, misunderstanding of assignments and overlap of roles and responsibilities among team members”, in order to bring a suitable resolution to the conflict.  (Bandow, 2001, p.42)

In sum, Diane Bandow’s article presents all the necessary ingredients of successful teams in a concise fashion.  It contains valid and easily implementable suggestions for common problem areas in team building, especially in the era of globalization.  Hence, it can also be perused by managers as a ready reference.