Each one of us works in various work environments possessing subordinates and peers, who form the resource pool that enables us to accomplish our work targets and grow the organization. In every walk of life, teamwork has a lot of significance, given its strength. A team implies togetherness and if aligned and united, it can indeed do marvels. It is very important the team leader has belief in his team and the team also has conviction in the team leader, with respect to him as well as the goals and targets. There are often instances when the targets set appear unreasonable and challenging making the team members to shy away from the same, thereby creating an atmosphere of dilution resulting into bottlenecks, which at times results into failures. In such instances, it is very important that the team leader encourages constructive criticism through brainstorming and gives the necessary confidence to his colleagues to enable them to have the same perception as him, and ensure continuity of alignment. This way, the team leader demonstrates true leadership skills.
For any team to achieve more, through their combined strength, their togetherness in spirit and action, is of utmost importance. This can be well noticed in the team sports events like Cricket, Kabaddi, Football, and Hockey. In a team, all members need to vibrate in the same frequency to reach the goal. This means that members should mutually appreciate their strength and weakness. Accordingly, collective strength is to be used in such a way that the weakness of one member is to be complemented by the strength of others. In sports like football and cricket, they think together, plan together, analyze together and improve together. Individual ego is kept at bay, enabling the team effectiveness is at its peak.
I think sports in a large way, becomes a good benchmark for business to look up to and derive some analogy. It teaches us to respect each other, follow the leader, performed by the clock, handle failures and celebrate wins. The learnings from sports need to be practiced on the shop floor and in the conference room amongst the MD of the company and the managers, supervisors, and operators – only then the company can achieve desired results. All these are vital elements of any business and often get ignored in our routine, only to result into disturbing results and negative growth. If only we can learn to look at every business situation through a sportsman’s eye, there could be the majority of moments when we could avoid a setback, and in the event, it appears, we would know a way to rise from it. The most important feature from the sports field that needs to be unanimously applied in the field of business is of the team leader sharing the success with the team. Equally important is to develop a second line of leadership.
Setting expectations to your team, and facilitating a culture of passion and responsiveness would help to nourish belief within the team. This would, in turn, pave the way to coach and develop a high-performance team which will make you successful in this highly competitive environment.
