The Importance of Team Work and Its Relation In Leadership (Essay Sample)

The Importance of Team Work and Its Relation in Leadership
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The Importance of Team Work and Its Relation in Leadership
Teamwork is critical to success of an organization. In some cases, teamwork determines the destiny of the organization. Team members rely on each other and take every opportunity to learn and grow their skills for the better of the entire organization. Soldiers learn to cooperate in their tasks because they understand that, what an individual can deliver is far less than what the team work can achieve. Teams are able to perform better when they are under pressure from their competitors enabling team working organizations to rise over individual working organizations. A team however cannot work effectively without having a commanding leader ((Yun, Cox & Sims, 2007). It takes a leader to command the army and advice them on which direction they should take. Team work is important and should be headed by a leader who understands the dynamics of teamwork.
Team building exercise is important to team leaders since it develops their management skills as well as promoting cooperative attitude of the teams. Leaders are important in teamwork because they are responsible of planning the team building skills that will enable their teams to understand the benefits of working together. For example, security organizations duties cannot be done single handedly. It takes the community to provide ground information of a criminal, the intelligence department to conduct comprehensive investigations, the judiciary to enact laws that authorizes the criminal prosecution and the court to prosecute the offender. Each department’s duty is dependent on the other’s findings to provide final results. Teamwork makes these duties easier by providing detailed results.
Teamwork develops communication skills and promotes understanding. This builds strong relationships essential for working towards one goal. The members understand that communication is the core principle to achieving the goals, since an individual’s idea has less productivity. Each team member’s idea is equally important and the leader should foster this by giving each person time to giver his/her contributions to the task. This should range from decision making to celebrating success. Teamwork requires trust and patience of a leader and confidence in one another. As the team works together, trust is developed through mounting confidence in one another’s abilities and reliability.
Teamwork promotes strengths and curtails weaknesses. When one member is weak in a certain area, it is difficult for the weakness to reduce the organizations productivity because it is blended by other members. Though individual contributions are important in the teams, teams that work together will not decrease their productivity because of the absenteeism of a single person. In a football match, a weaker lineman is aided by a team member to block a rival player. The leader needs to understand his team members’ strengths and weaknesses so that he can place them where their strengths and passions can be used. For example, confident and eloquent people are best situated in marketing departments.
Team work is highly reliable in health care organizations to reduce patients’ complications resulting from poor communication between nurses (Manser, 2008). Some patients visits hospitals with low risk illness but develop deadly illnesses because of poor communication between nurses. If mutual performance is not enhanced, the patient succumbs to death (Baker, Day & Sala, 2006). In healthcare organizations every specialist depends on the findings of the other specialists. For instance, during surgery more than three specialists are involved in the process because every session calls for a specified professionalism. Therefore, team work can save a life.
Teamwork is important because it gets the job done quickly and accurately (Mickan & Rodger, 2000). In power plantations, some processes require urgency and cooperation of the staff. When a station experiences power surges, a team is necessary to establish the source of the problem, both from the station and the power providing station. Team work makes the task easy. This saves time that an individual could have used to travel from the power providing station to the station to correct the problem. The members are also likely to deliver better results because each of them is dealing with a specific location and therefore his efforts are focused to a single system. In teamwork, labor is integrated evenly allowing the team to work faster than if it were done alone.
Teamwork promotes a healthy competition environment. In an organization managed by a transformational leader who energizes the team by rewarding them for good performances, the teams work corporately to attract more rewards from greater performances (Dionne, Yammarino, Atwater & Spangler, 2004). However, though teamwork is productive and produces ultimate success, it calls for sacrifice and hard work. The team members lay down their self interest and surrender to group’s interest. This is not easy and that is why a leader is crucial to help the teams understand the sacrifice is the worth the accomplishments they can achieve. The leader should thereby focus on team building skills that empower the members to achieve the organization’s long term goals.
Finally, working in a team makes work to be fun than a burden (Yun, Cox & Sims, 2007). Students can use teamwork in their studies especially on the subjects or projects they find hard to understand. They can ga...