Fostering Teamwork

Leon Brooks picks up on my previous post about motivating via competition, suggesting, if I understand correctly, making cooperation a key to winning the competition. It seems to me that coming up with a system of rules to encourage team work is doing things the hard way. If you want people to work as a team, make them a team. Put them on the same side, all striving for the same goal to get shared rewards.

In other words, instead of competitions between team members, set a common challenge for them and have them work as a team to achieve it together. Then reward them all equally. If you really must have competitions get them to work together to beat another team. Beware of this though, particularly if you were thinking of engineering vs marketing – you want your engineering team and marketing team to be a part of the company team and work together just as much as you want your engineers to work together. Maybe try challenging your competitors to some sort of contest would work.

The reality though is that if you want to get more out of any of your teams, you need to make them enjoy their work more, either by improving the work they do or their work environment so that they want to be at work and want to get stuff done. The benefits of competition are short-lived, the benefit of loving your job lasts as long as the job is still worth loving.