The magic of Teamwork !!!

                                              “It takes two flints to make a fire.”

                                                                       -Louisa May Alcott

A single flint can not make a fire. It is useless until other flint is brought into contact with it. Together, they can produce unbelievable effect i.e.fire. Similarly, individuals can not do great work unless they work with others as a team. Every manager knows the power of Teamwork. In fact the very existence of a manager can be attributed to the phenomenon of 'Teams'. If human beings had long decided to do every task individually,the world would not have progressed as it has progressed now. The Valley Crossing exercise purely focused on learning this phenomenon called 'Teamwork'.

In this exercise, three people need to cross  a  "valley".The distance between edges is more than one step but less than two steps.The only item they have with them is a small thick pole/stick.

In the above exercise, each person faces 3 states of risks:

          (a) Safe

          (b) Half Safe/ Half Risky

          (c) Risky

The steps of 3 persons and their risk conditions are as shown in the figure below :

Persons	First Person	Second Person	Third person
Steps
1	Safe	Safe	Safe
2	Half Risky
3	Full Risky
4	Half Risky	Half Risky
5		Full Risky
6		Half Risky	Half Risky
7			Full Risky
8			Half Risky
9	Safe	Safe	Safe

The manager must also ensure that the work is properly and equally divided among team members. The following table clearly shows the work done by each person is equal. Each person is performing all the steps one by one in order to achieve common goal. We can also see that  66.6% of the time the worker is fully safe. Division of Labour also share the risk and mitigates it as the risky has been mitigated to half risky. One of the task  of a manger is to mitigate the risk on each individual worker.

     

	Safe	Half Safe/ Half Risky	Risky	Total:
Person A	6	2	1	9
Person B	6	2	1	9
Person C	6	2	1	9
Total:	18	6	3	27

Open and clear communication  is the key to crossing valley effectively.  Every person needed to trust each other completely especially when their feet was off the ground. Dealing with conflict openly and transparently and not allowing grudges to build up and destroy team is also of paramount importance.The goals were clear, defined and each member in the team fully understood the gravity of the problem. Each team member understands what they must do (and what they must not do) to demonstrate their commitment to the team and to support team success. Furthermore the roles and  responsibilities keep on changing depending on the situation. The bonds between the team members allow them to seamlessly coordinate their work to achieve both efficiency and effectiveness. An overall team culture that is open, transparent, positive, future-focused and able to deliver success is critical in any team.

I would like to end with following quote of Michael Jordan

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.”

Happy Reading!!!