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Teamwork

Here’s to Peace, Joy, and…Better Teamwork in 2017!

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What?  Yes, better teamwork!  The kind that impacts the bottom line by giving your managers and employees more time to innovate, work hard, and deliver higher quality products and services.

Don’t believe it?

According to a study conducted by Accountemps, managers at Fortune 1,000 firms conservatively “spend 13% of their work time—the equivalent of seven weeks a year—mending employee relationships” and otherwise dealing with unhealthy conflict.

That’s a lot of management time that could otherwise be spent leading change, driving innovation, building competitive advantage, and adding to the bottom line.  Instead, it’s time lost to cleaning up problems that don’t need to occur.  Imagine the possibilities if better teamwork recovered just half of that lost opportunity.

Unfortunately, the problem goes beyond manager productivity.  Poor teamwork also impacts the rest of the workforce.  In 2013, Harvard Business Journal reported that employees’ reactions to incivility in their workplace included intentional (yes, intentional!) decreases in work time, quality, and effort.  In short:  team dysfunction and unhealthy conflict in the workplace means lowered productivity, poorer quality, and lost business.  Ouch!

The opportunity that effective teamwork offers for enhanced workforce performance and bottom-line results is why best-selling author and management consultant, Patrick Lencioni, observes:

“Teamwork remains the only sustainable competitive advantage that has been largely untapped.”

This sentiment was validated in Forbes’ recent article, 10 Workplace Trends You’ll see in 2017, where it was cited that organizations will continue to “focus on team over individual performance.”  Although individuals, including Millennials and Generation Z, will be focused on individual careers, companies recognize that it’s high-performing teams that “enable them to compete for the future.”

So, yes!  Here’s to peace, joy and greater teamwork in 2017!