FIMO English Club: Developing Teamwork skill

What is a team?

A team is an autonomous group of people. Each team member has different advantages and disadvantages. People work together to achieve shared goals.

Teamwork refers to working together, helping other teammates in order to achieve group benefits.

Some factors that impact on working performance of a team

• Share same goals: a team must have shared goals among members. Goals must be obvious and measurable and each team member understand the goals.
• Each member has a distinct role: each person should be assigned to suitable tasks according to his ability.
• Relationships between team members: they should believe and respect each other. Be nice to help other people in order to reach shared goals. Be honest and open-minded.
• Communication in a team:
  • Share ideas and opinions.
  • Listen and respect other people’s opinions.
  • Toward same goals.
  • Encourage new ideas.
  • Choose to communicate in suitable time and place.
• Ability to solve a problem together

Stages of developing a team

Building a successful team needs a lot of time and effort. There are four stages of developing a team as listed below:

1. Forming stage: the starting stage of building a team. In this state, people investigate other members. They tend to be hesitated to contribute comments or ideas. People may be doubting and discomfort and often ask questions. These problems result in low degree of completion of work.

So in this state, we should getting to know our teammates, setting shared goals together and listening to other people’s desire.

2. Storming stage: this is the hardest state. In this phase, internal contradictions may occur. Besides, there are always competition and self-defense or even sectarian divisions. People may also be selfish. Like the forming state, working performance is low.

To prevent those problems, we can:

• Distinct roles and tasks of each member.
• Resolve conflict together.
• Build law and discipline together.
• Reward and praise.
• Assess working performace of every member.

3. Norming stage: in this state, woking performance is significantly increased. People respect discipline that they have built together. They are also open-minded and don’t hesitate to share intentions. Ability to solve shared problems together is also improved.

So we should continue to promote discipline, break any remaining barriers among members to strenthen member relationships. People may also ask for others’s opinions.

4. Performing stage: this state has best working performance. People are creative, innovative and uniformnity. Personal development is promoted. Team members are highly believable. Information stream flows smoothly in the team.

To maintain this state, we should keep and strengthen team motivation. Each person works hard to improve himself. We also need to set new goals together.

Chuc Man Duc