A work team must not only be integrated and synchronized, but also the people who compose it must share goals, but information, decisions, be also united in a common focus. They must attend to Knowledge Management strategies and seek efficiency in a simple way.
Communities of Practice
Teamwork is clearly essential for any knowledge-intensive organization, the vast majority are, and surely where you are working is. But not “workgroups”, think of a team (such as soccer) where each participant is a fundamental piece with roles, responsibilities, and actions to be carried out.
A work team must not only be integrated and synchronized, but also the people who compose it must share goals, but information, decisions, be also united in a common focus.
Certain conditions must be met for them:
- Be informed of the long-term goal.
- Be committed to the medium objectives that will allow us to achieve this global focus.
- Know what role you play in the strategy to reach them.
- Know the progress and scope of your actions, and those of each person with whom you share them.
- Have a general plan of the progress of all.
In this sense, it is necessary to have ways to share the knowledge of each one, their contributions and progress, improve the relationship of interdependence, and what can be executed independently.
For this, the ways of acting in a productive way (personal and team) must be structured and broken down, and always thinking about (because we are clear about it):
- What the organization needs us to do.
- What the team must contribute to the organization.
- My contribution in all this and how it meshes with the goals of the team.
We must also be clear that a large part of the strategy (staff/team/organization) must be leveraged mostly in knowledge management, its methodologies, and tools so that it contributes to all of us. This can be seen in the descriptive image shown at the beginning of the article (which we will also discuss in future posts on this blog).
Factors to carry out this work must be understood from two perspectives:
- Personal Organization
On an individual basis, important challenges are posed to arrive on time for all our tasks and fulfill the personal and integral functioning of the team itself.
Let us bear in mind that there are specific methodologies and specialized software, among them GTD (Getting Things Done / Doing things / Solving things), for this and other methods of self-organization you must have the intention and only worry about applying it, not being overwhelmed by the technology that should serve you (never vice versa, because adapting to software is not logical, therefore it would not work for you).
- The Team Organization
As we anticipated in previous paragraphs, the team must meet a series of requirements to function efficiently (common objectives, clear roles, and tasks, constant communication, synchronization of efforts, interpersonal supports). We will also discuss this in future chapters.
Then, they remain as pending tasks, write in detail about: each element of the graph, personal organization, and team organization.