Thanks for your visit and a very thoughtful and insightful contribution. Your emphasis on collaboration, and on how to develop it, is certainly well-placed, and your analogy is a terrific one.

I will pick up your book the next time I’m in the States.

Thanks again for your visit, your comments, and your work.

Imagine this – you arrive to work on Monday morning and find that your team has won the right to handle the company’s most important client. As a result the team will be expanded to deal with the extra workload.

There is already a huge list of well qualified and high quality applicants for the expansion – your team has the “pick of the litter” because everyone in the company knows your team develops their people to their highest potential.

Mondays are a great day of the week for your high performing team. Members arrive refreshed from the week-end and look forward to meeting up for another challenging but rewarding week. There is a palpable sense of clarity and focus on the team objectives. Balanced with a playful approach to learning something new everyday and towards overcoming the inevitable set backs and challenges. By the end of the week you know that team will be a little wiser, a little stronger and the sense of community a little deeper than before.

Then the alarm clock goes off. And you awake to your real world. And it is Monday morning and you have had such a lovely dream you were sad to leave it. Ahead of you is the commute, the pile of “stuff” that will greet you when you get to work. The silent, trudging along, colleagues trying to conceal their quiet desperation about another Monday morning and a week ahead of sporadic at best, team-work.

There will be the inevitable crises during the week leaving you feeling physically and emotionally spent by the weeks end (or even earlier). A good portion of your week-end is spent “recovering” from the effects of the week. Rinse and repeat.

What distinguishes these two scenarios? Simple – collaborative team work.

If building a collaborative team was easy everyone would belong to one. That’s the bad news. The good news is that with the right tools people can do to develop their team from the “inside out”. Articles on ways to improve teamwork point to the fact that a great team never consists of an assembly of unmotivated and dysfunctional individuals.

“High Performing Team” (HPT) rule number one: HPTs are made up of well-developed individuals.

Conclusion: to grow great teams – grow great people

For more insight on my comment feel free to read “Teaching an Anthill to Fetch”. I think you will enjoy it.

Regards,

Stephen Joyce