Team work is the mandate for success today (Column: Spy’s Eye)

By D.C. Pathak

The Covid-19 pandemic will be remembered for the lasting trends it has set in flattening the organisational pyramid by spreading out the manpower in a hybrid work environment, decentralising decision-making and greatly enhancing the autonomous delivery by team leaders.

It proved to be an agent for the 'corrective' that the businesses and organisational practices needed for a long time in terms of efficiency of operations, personal accountability and the emerging concept of participative management.

The burden of hierarchy was being lightened as the leadership function of deciding on a crucial matter, was being pushed down to levels where an informed evaluation of necessary factors could still be made - the decision-making on strategic matters or the broad policies of the organisation being rightly reserved for the Board Room.

The need for closer supervision - compelled by stricter scrutiny by customers for the quality of products and services - has led to the switch-over to a system where the senior would be willing to give guidance where asked for by those below and adopt a nurturing approach to the latter. These are the hallmarks of participative management.

Covid levelled the field for all business players, strengthened organisational loyalty and made every employee a virtual stakeholder in the enterprise's success. There is a refreshing recognition of the need to return to honest profit-making, step up organisational efforts to keep the employees happy and expand the charter of HRD to include upskilling programmes and the work of developing leadership qualities in the team heads.

On the whole, the challenge of economic revival that the nation faces has made businesses and the corporate world better attuned to this larger objective and turned them more alive to the national perspectives on what was happening in the world. The globalisation of Indian business is now tempered by a new kind of awareness of social and human situations within the country and outside.

There is a paradigm shift in the understanding of teamwork resulting in a new approach to it. It is the demand of the Age of Information that decisions should have a knowledge base and that the gap between 'decision' and 'action' should not be so large as to cause the failure of the project in a competitive environment.

Within the strategic framework of the organisation, work has to be pushed forward by leaders who were closer to the cutting edge of the business and directly connected with the output or delivery.

This is the age of team leaders who should work on three principles. The first is that the 'individual is the centre of productivity' who can be improved with proper handling. Secondly, it is important to leverage individual strengths when constituting a team. And thirdly, a team leader should understand that every employee carries tacit knowledge about the work being pursued, which was to be garnered for hastening the march towards the goal.

In a good organisation, vertical and peer interactions combine all the time to create a grid for maximising production. In a team, there is little scope for flawed communication to become a cause for failure since the principal weakness of a bureaucracy-ridden corporate body- a remote and impersonal format in which communications were couched - did not exist here.

Communications are an ongoing process knitted into any business operation and teams are the level where they proved most productive. A good leader is basically a good communicator. The team head, on one hand, understands the people working with him or her closely enough to get the best out of them and has a direct reach to the top leadership, on the other, in order to act as the organisational bridge between the two.

While assembling the right team it should be remembered that no two persons are equal in all respects. A multicultural team can be a powerhouse of creativity. The leader should have the ability to distinguish between brilliance and willingness to put in hard work since one is not the substitute of the other.

In today's world, the team should try to eliminate 'time stealers' in any situation. Being seemingly busy is not the same thing as being productive. Being 'smart' means producing more per unit of 'resource' and today 'time' is also a resource apart from money and manpower. Time is not to be wasted if a competitive edge was to be maintained.

The success of team leadership should be judged by the degree to which a stress-free mode of working had been established. The team should work on the power of relationship that is built on the tradition of giving and seeking legitimate help.

The team like the organisation of which it was a part, must be well-informed on matters that were relevant to its operations and must have the ability to access new information on an ongoing basis. Knowledge-based decision-making requires that the information used must be reliable and that there was a capacity to take timely action on the same.

The team is well placed even to suggest a 'course correction' to the leadership at the top - because the need for that would originate from the experience of the team of what was not working both at the strategic and operational levels.

Successful organisations are realising that what they needed the most was a set of leaders who could guide teams to get them to perform at their best.

Those at the top of the firm were only required to take policy decisions about the 'mission', funding and corporate ethics. The team leaders were updated on these and were empowered to take a decision on their own within the policy framework if in their judgement that became necessary in the corporate interest.

In a phase of layoffs, reallocations and multi-tasking, loyalty to the organisation is a fundamental requirement of the firm and both sides - employer and the employee - understood that.

Beyond the strategy laid down by those at the apex, the team leaders had the discretion, authority, and hands-on experience of evaluating the level of productivity, awareness of the scope for medium-term to long-range plans of expansion and an idea of the newer ways of competing with others.

The team leader's own stock would be determined not only by his personal contribution to business but more importantly by his ability to improve the performance of each of the team members.

An important quality of leadership is that credit was given where due and temptation as the head of the team to corner all of it was avoided.

In an Intelligence set-up, for instance, the head would give away credit to the men working for him or her and front for any challenge of shortfall of result at the end of an individual or collective endeavour - that was of course pitched at the highest possible level - in line with the traditional work ethics of such an organisation.

In classical terms, this would mean that 'failure' was to be redefined as an honest effort that did not succeed and called for a 'relaunch' with new learning.

The competitive business has to imbibe this approach and certainly keep away from shortcuts to profit. The business world needs to connect better with the socio-cultural, environmental and human situations around and get rid of the stigma of short-changing the customer, hoodwinking the user through 'promotion' and compromising with the quality of projects that affected the population anywhere. These guarantees are sustained at the level of team leadership and this is what gives newfound importance to the latter.

The induction of technology has created a world of instant communication across geographical boundaries, redefined leadership, introduced the concept of 'knowledge worker', affected management protocols and brought in 'globalisation'. It has given a new kind of importance to being well-informed for achieving success in any sphere and laid the turf for the transition of the world from Age of Information to the Age of Intelligence since the push of competition was making it crucial for gaining an advantage it was not enough to match the competitor on information in the present but to somehow make a successful assessment of what lay ahead.

In other words 'business Intelligence' was the base of a competitive advantage which is the reason why corporate enterprises were investing in the collation and analysis of relevant information to make readings of future trends and plan business operations accordingly.

The team leaders in any organisation are best placed to read the environ closer to the people, notice the trends of demand and supply and see how technological advancement was in play in determining the prospects in business and trade. Their feedback was pivotal to the task of analysts handling business Intelligence for helping future planning and investment.

A team leader in an organisation today is like a General who chooses to work on the battlefront. He is fully equipped with the knowledge of organisational strategy and policy framework and by virtue of his placement is capable of suggesting the best options for business advancement, diversification and correction.

Business organisations at the top are already beginning to place their best leaders on the hands-on task of heading teams for maximising productivity, matching the competitor in the quality of products and services and facilitating a wholistic development of the company's human resources.

It is possible to define some of the best practices good teams follow that guarantee success.

First, since every workplace faces challenges and uncertainty, it is desirable to include the entire team in deliberating on such a situation. This brainstorming will utilise varied perspectives and bring out tacit knowledge that a member had but did not get a chance to share with others. It should be realised that everyone potentially knows something that others might not have thought of because the work experience of two persons might not be the same always.

Secondly, a team would not be able to perform at its best unless mutual respect became an intrinsic part of it. This makes the members feel safer, comfortable and motivated. The onus of this lies on the team leader whose communication skills ensured that team members knew what was expected of them. Good communication becomes even more important if the team was engaged in a sensitive project that needed clarity in everybody's mind about the importance of collectively working for it.

Thirdly, in a good team, members did not hesitate to ask for and give help. There is camaraderie running through the team. This will happen if the leader had established an environment where everyone believed that his or her effort was appreciated and there was no confusion about credit sharing. A good team allows little scope for buck-passing.

The fourth flag mark of a well-performing team again relates to its leader who had to be adept at not only delegating responsibilities but also resolving conflicts before they escalated into big problems. At the same time, the leader sees in a certain difference of opinion an opportunity of turning it into a productivity enhancer.

Collaboration encouraged creativity and diverse viewpoints often helped in that.

Last but not the least, teamwork is not just about aiming at finishing the task faster - though this can be a welcome outcome of a team that functioned well - but also reaffirming the principle that people with different strengths when working together in a stress-free environment established by a mentoring leadership, can increase overall productivity over a sustained period.

Finally, the evolution of management governing the post-Covid era has mandated that the organisation should regard itself as a collective of teams and team leaders and not as a monolith built around a vertical hierarchy.

The leaders at the top also have to guide and brief the team heads according to the strategy and policies finalised in the Board Meeting- they are thus performing the function of a 'super' team leader themselves.

The team leader has to create an environment that was most conducive to productivity. The most important requirement of this is the establishment of a system that freed the organisation of any misgivings about credit-sharing and thus created a tradition of trust. This in fact is the final test of a successful leader and a productive organisation.

In the right environment three things happen - all employees share the tacit knowledge they carried on matters that could be of help to the corporate body, the team members do not hesitate to seek and give help and they had no need to pass the buck on to another person.

Organisations often miss the gains accruing to them from the information of value personally available to members just because they did not arrange to garner that knowledge through formal or informal interactions.

A senior who thrives on the credit 'stolen' from his own team members would not last as a 'leader'. The leader gets laurels for any good work done by the team and therefore, he or she should also take a share of responsibility for anything going wrong with the team. Such a leader will always command the trust, loyalty and respect of the team. What works ultimately is the realisation that all business is human activity and it is the individual who is at the centre of all productivity, technology induction and overall success of the team.

(The writer is a former Director of Intelligence Bureau. Views expressed are personal)

Source: IANS