Teamwork: the route to success

As you know I'm passionate about collaborative working. I'm also very interested in sport and I find inspiration from seeing the effects of teamwork in the sporting environment.

Teamwork is everywhere, there is not a single performance of note that isn't the result of a fully effective team. Take Paula Radcliff, the brilliant middle/long distance runner, for example. Paula is like an iceberg, no I don't mean she's cold and hard, I mean she is the visible tip of a dedicated team. Beneath her truly world leading performances both on the track and across country, Paula is supported by motivation and fitness coaches, nutrition, physiotherapy and sports injury specialists and a dedicated husband who acts as her manager and planner. Of course it's much easier to see this with larger teams, like the English Rugby Union world champions, where you often have sight of the 'back room boys and girls'.

Even then, the team is much more than the 15 who take the field for any given game, so what can we learn from them? Most teams operate in a squad system. The squad is made up of the members who are most likely to be able to satisfy all the challenges the team will face, but a different 15 often take the field because they have different skills or experience or form. Rotation systems also ensure that all squad members are given the opportunity to perform and remain motivated and committed. For me this is like a framework agreement. The customer (whether they be end client, main contractor or specialist) selects a squad of sufficient size to be able to meet their anticipated needs and then assembles the integrated teams from this pool. The whole integrated team may be kept together or a core of the team augmented by others from the pool, all depending on the needs of the next project. In this way continuity is assured and the whole framework team grow and improve together.

We need to select those most capable of delivering the objectives, not those willing to take huge risks.

One of the reasons sports teams are so effective is they are fused together by crystal clear objectives to which they all aspire; both squad objectives and game objectives. In fully effective frameworks all the pool members must share this attribute with sports teams. They need to understand the reasons the framework has been assembled, what the expected outcomes are and how these translate to the projects within the framework.

What about selection? This is often a highly emotive part of sports team activity and is frankly no different to construction. However, despite the significance of selection in the sporting world, this onerous task is handed to a small group who are trusted to act. Their judgement may be criticised, but their authority is absolute. As a result they are able to make decisions based on what will benefit the objectives not on some other arbitrary grounds, like lowest cost tendering in construction. Imagine what it would be like if players were selected from their bids for how much they are prepared to sacrifice. You would have a team filled with people who have offered to train harder and longer than anyone else, they would be so tired they would hardly be able to stand, let alone compete. They would provide all their own equipment, turning out in a multicoloured array of tops rather than the single strip a team needs. In construction we need to make sure we select those most capable of delivering the objectives, not those most willing to take huge sacrifices and risks.