Teams: 8 things that can go wrong.
Nº 3. Inter team rivalry
Inter-team rivalry only becomes a problem when it starts to damage other elements of the organisation around it or the organisation itself. Rivalry can obviously be a benefit when competing sales teams drive overall sales up and up, or when competing 'improvement groups' implement successive intiatives that produce incremental cost reductions or efficiency improvements.
Here are some symptoms that you are sure to recognise when the rivalry is counter-productive:
- work isn't done; one team blames the other.
- information flow is slow or erratic, even when it concerns important information.
- when one team asks for help from another, the answer is a variation of "That's your problem".
- tasks that require cooperation between teams run into regular and serious difficulties.
- People do not like to move from one team to another.
Ther are two types of initiative to take which can help to overcome the problem. The first set of initiatives brings people together in sub-groups or as teams:
- social events.
- teambuilding activities where real work teams are mixed up.
- inviting members of the other teams toyour meetings.
- identifying problems common to you and other teams, and setting up a mixed-team task groups to fix specific issues.
The second set of initiatives is to introduce ways to measure team effectiveness that look at how well each team provides service to other teams:
- ask other teams what your team does that is helpful and how it could function differently in a way that would help more.
- send a 'customer satisfaction' questionnaire on your team to members of other teams that you work with.
- have a senior person in the company discuss with your team his or her perceptions of how well it supports other teams.
We will look at the remaining 5 problems in future newsletters. This
information and advice is focused on team working, but is also of much
wider application in our day-to-day lives.
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