Clearing the Way for Teamwork

Clearing the Way for Teamwork
N. Dean Meyer*

“The four most common obstacles to teamwork—the real reasons why teamwork doesn’t happen—are the following:

Real Reason 1: Incentives
Incentives may be designed to block teamwork. Many organizations still use a job-grading system that decides people’s titles and salaries based on the size of the group they manage, i.e., their headcount and budget. People are paid to build empires!…

Real Reason 2: Culture
Culture is ‘the way we work around here’—the practices common throughout an organization. And many organizations have bad habits ingrained in their cultures that undermine teamwork… Contrary to popular opinion, culture is one of the easier dimensions of an organization to fix. The key is to focus on practices, not values.

Real Reason 3: Structure
Structure is another common root cause. People think the only way to get staff to work together is to put them under a common boss. Thus, it’s common to find support groups reporting to one of their internal ‘customers’ and unavailable to the rest of the IT team…The key to overcoming this obstacle is internal customer-supplier relationships…

Real Reason 4: Resources
The fourth obstacle to teamwork is the most common and the most powerful: resources. Often, managers are willing to help one another, but their staff’s time and budgets are fully committed to their own priorities. This occurs when managers have their own budgets, and are expected to satisfy their customers’ demands as best they can with the resources they’ve been given. Each manager sets his or her own priorities for resources, and one manager’s highest priority may very well be another’s lowest priority. That, alone, is enough to kill teamwork.”

From: Team-Building and Teamwork
By N. Dean Meyer, CIO, April 30, 2006

Sperry Van Ness International has specialist in all disciplines of commercial real estate brokerage.  Members of the Sperry Van Ness Multi Family Team, Auction Team, Sale-Lease back, Asset Recovery  mini-storage team and other teams are comprised of Commercial Real Estate brokers of the highest caliber.  Neil Victor, CCIM   is Senior Advisor with Sperry Van Ness Huntsville Office.  Being part of the SVN organization allows us to access tool such as Site to Do Business and help our clients make sound real estate decisions.