Reading Response 5: Key Factors in Teamwork

Most work have to be done by teams, but a team, whether having a large or small scale, is actually a complex syestem that requires much effort to organize.Those key factors should be taken into consideration when cooperating at the team level.

1.A good leader.

Teamwork does not mean that you are working alone, the tasks are divided up into individuals. If all the people are working on the same stuff at the same time, ingoring other parts, potential disaster would occur like the Flight 401. The three crew members were all focusing on the pesky light bulb, unnoticed of the disengaged autopilot so that unexpected accident happened, and it should had been avoided if all of them were arranged to do specific work before. As a lesson, leadership is crucial in teams, which needs a outstanding leader who can take an authoritative role by setting priorities, delegating tasks, and making sure that all the important responsibilities are covered. As every team member has distinct physical and phychological characteristics, the leader should be skilled at assigning tasks according to their strengths and weaknesses and be brilliant, brave, calm to make quick but right decisions when facing emergencies. Futhermore, every team need a leader who is willing to listen to and adopt other's opinions instead of a domineering, macho one who intimidates other members, which may results in a deadly mistake.

2. Communication

Team memebers should exchange their ideas at times, knowing what others are doing or how the whole project is going, not based solely on independent, selfish behaviour. Only by having more communications, even a glance out of the corner the eye, can they wok as a entity, cooperating and coodinating well to process the project toward the ultimate goal.

3. Respect

The down side of bringing people together with different backgrounds and training is they have different perspectives and ways of seeing and talking about the world, which leads certain conflicts. For example, surgeons and anaesthetists always argue about the appropriate time to administer anaesthetic. In reality, they both seek for their own convenient, one not want to monitor the unconscious patient for long periods while the other hate wasting their valuable time, both ignoring the patient's situation. So "respect" here means respect the reality, they should adopt the method beneficial to the patient (the optimal time to administer it acoording to patient's health status) not to themselves. In addition, the work team comprises people having diverse level of knowledge, such as new starters, professionals, experts. Juniors should respect and learn from those experienced experts, more importantly, those experts should listen to juniors' advices and not critique or refute it immeadiately. In a word, respect, affinity is essential to a viable team.

Another point is recognizing and coping well with cultural differences. As globalization makes the world smaller place and requires people from different nationalities to work together. A perfect plan for one country may be totally useless, even lead to side effects for another country due to the custom, religion or other specific reasons. So whether to adopt a plan in international team work depends on the real situations in the target country. Those above are the limited facors facilitating teamwork, there still be a wide range of it to be explored.