Leadership or Teaming (and How to Get Things Done)
A boss will tell you what to do.
A leader might guide you in doing it.
A team gets it done.
In the five years I spent researching teamwork, the more I looked the more one thing became clear: leadership in practice is far less tangible than we like to think. But what was clear was how people actually work together to get things done. How problems are solved. How challenges are overcome. How ideas take shape. How progress is made.
This is teaming.
Every team output is a team effort. You might have a leader who sets a direction or is accountable for decisions, but it is the teams who get things done. That is not to say that a ‘leader’ is an ‘other’ - someone separate from a team. Precisely the opposite. Every individual, no matter their job title, can be a member of a team, any team in fact. What matters is that each person contributes to discussions and how they contribute to discussions.
This is the essence of teaming. How people work well together to get things done and deliver more than they set out to do. But teaming can go further. Good teaming brings four core benefits that go beyond regular teamwork. When teams do teaming well, they:
Generate new, innovative ideas and solutions
Enrich team engagement
Break down communication barriers and silos
Turn failures into sustainable successes.
Exclusive to TeamingSmart, Dr Marc Owens has created the Teaming Toolkit to help you put teaming into practice.
The Teaming Toolkit
Overcome teamwork challenges, improve decision making, and turn failures into sustainable successes through a practical teaming approach with the Teaming Toolkit. Let’s focus on improving what your teams are already doing instead of adding more meetings or processes.
Target the foundations of your interactions
Teamwork is built on the interactions we have every day. Through focusing on what actually happens in our interactions, understanding how they unfold and how we achieve our goals together, we can uncover what good teamwork looks like.
Establish your interactional teams with talk
Interactional teams are established as people work towards achieving their shared goals together. They are dynamic and constructed through interaction. The membership interactional teams changes moment-by-moment as different people contribute.
Act together for productive teamwork
Teaming is not a process - it’s a set of actions, actions that should be produced together. These key actions can be leveraged when appropriate to push a team forward and help them go beyond their goal to realise additional value.
Multiply your inputs to realise value
Teaming delivers more than the sum of parts. It enables teams to find better solutions, overcome challenges, and turn failures into sustainable successes. It can enhance and leverage every available resource and interactional tool to maximise return.
Fundamentally, teaming is an equaliser. When people are teaming well, rank and job titles don’t matter. Anyone and everyone can make valuable contributions in any area, not just ‘leaders’.