Benefits of Teamwork

 "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships"

Michael Jordan

Teamwork is an essential skill that will greatly benefit our lives. If you remember just over two week ago I published a post called: 8 Steps to Improve Teamwork Skills. I now think that it would be a good idea to write about the benefits that teamwork brings. These benefits are based off of a fully-functioning team that works well together, however, even dysfunctional teams can experience some of these benefits.

1. Efficiency and Productivity

The saying; "many hands make light work", is definitely a true one when it comes to teamwork. If you have a job that needs doing, having someone else there to give you a helping hand is obviously going to speed the process up - if you have a group of people, then the process will be quickened all the more.

Lets say that you have a job that if you were to attempt on your own would take you, lets say in the region of around 2 hours (for example). If you had one person helping you who didn't need assistance and worked at a similar speed to you, you could have the task done in an hour, 50% of the time. If you was to have three people helping you (four including yourself), you could have it done in half an hour, 25% of the time.

For larger tasks teamwork is essential, and it's through careful planning and team management that aids towards a healthy team, and where efficiency and productivity are relied heavily upon.

2. Support

When working in a larger team, support is going to naturally manifest itself. Support wont always go out to every team-member, but on the whole, when a job is needed to be completed, a team will naturally encourage one another to help keep morale high.

When people know that they have the support and backing of a team, it's amazing what that individual can accomplish within the team.

3. Satisfaction

When you complete a job that takes effort and time, you will experience a feeling of achievement and satisfaction. When working with a team, this feeling is only enhanced. This is as you have people to share your achievement and happiness with. You can have some of the greatest achievements in the world but if you have no one to share them with, will you feel as good as having the chance to share those same achievements with a team, who took the journey with you?

4. Communication

When working in a team, communication will need to be established. If a team can't communicate - it can't and won't work. 

In a team, there are lots of different individuals from different walks of life, being brought-up in different environments. The individuals of any team will have varying personalities, and so working in close proximity with these different characters will get you used to how to communicate with them. As I'm sure you know, what may be okay to say to one person may not be appropriate to say to another. Working in this environment will help to round-off and develop communication.

If you want, I have written a post called: 12 Ways to Communicate Effectively in which I gave some tips how you can improve upon your communication skills. 

5. Participation, involvement and confidence

Being part of a group where good team management is present will mean that tasks will be fairly and evenly distributed to all team members. When this is done, team members will feel like they are properly a member of the team, and when a team achieves what it sets out to achieve, then this feeling will only increase.

Also, by not being sidelined, there is a good chance that your confidence levels will increase as you are being treated equally alongside everybody-else in the group.

6. Innovation

When a team has gelled and is working effectively with one another, innovation will see an all-time high. It's not surprising to see a link between innovation and a good team. Two brains, or in a groups case, a group of brains are better than one - so take advantage of this.