Strategic Management Blog
Strategic Management for groups/teams
Working in groups and teams is always better than working alone, as an individual. Groups support each other and together they work towards a collective end goal. When an individual in a group is not capable of doing a specific part towards the end goal, another group or team member could be able to do the job or members of a team are able to ask questions to each other and help each other out.
However, a group of people is not yet a team. When a group of people becomes a team they do only one thing, working together. This sounds very simple but in practice, it is not. This can be managed by attention for success factors and pitfalls when cooperating in a team, a decent selection of every team member and evaluation of the team development.
Important aspects that need to be considered are the way of communication within a group so for example short lines when communicating, this could solve problems in a quick and fast way. Meetings are necessary to maintain, evaluate and adjust processes when needed within a group. In addition, everyone needs its own responsibilities and objectives to be achieved before a deadline. Formulation of SMART objectives could be an option to use. Other relevant aspects to consider are cultural backgrounds, languages and acceptance of everyone within the group.
When all above is executed in a proper way, a group is more likely to become a team. For managers these points should be of high interest to improve the performance of teams within their organization.