Teamwork Tactics – How to Get Shit Done

Imagine for a second that you are stopped dead on the freeway. You’re stuck in the heat of the summer. You can feel the heat radiate up from the sizzling concrete, and a drip of sweat pours down from your forehead determined to burn the edge of your eyeball with its salt content.

You wonder why you’re sitting in traffic. Like seriously…you’re on a 5 lane massive highway with tons of room, yet you’re sitting completely still. It’s obvious that had you waited just an hour or two before you decided to get on this hell road you would have been doing 70 miles per hour with the breeze in your hair. Instead though, you’re sitting in traffic.

You’re stuck now though. Even if you wanted out you are gridlocked in and the next exit isn’t for another 3 miles…and that’s a *VERY* long distance when you’re sitting still.

But what if everyone could tell what you were thinking? What if everyone could work together to achieve a goal (like getting you out of here) instead of every car for themselves?

Think about this: what if every single person on the freeway decided to accelerate at the exact same millisecond?
What you would witness if that happened would be a complete solution to traffic jams for eternity.

If everyone accelerated at the exact same speed at the exact same time, everyone could literally get wherever they needed to go quickly. If everyone on the freeway could just coordinate together, let each other know where they were going, and remember the position and speed of everyone else, there would be no more dead stops on a hot summer afternoon.

Not only would that solve the traffic jam problem…it would solve virtually all car accidents resulting from human error (about 99%)…and the world would be a better place.

Unfortunately for us though, that will never happen.

Here’s the Good News

The good news is that you can apply this concept to your business.

You should ALWAYS aim to let everyone on your team know the position and speed of everyone else. Think about it…if everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and more importantly, they know where everyone else is going, they can all work together and be MUCH more effective in the long term.

In my opinion, just knowing what everyone else is doing isn’t enough. It’s too short-term to really be useful. Although I think it will help much more then no teamwork and coordination at all, I think to really be effective, everyone needs to be aware of the ultimate destination or goal, and what everyone else is doing in relation to it.

If everyone works on their own little piece of the project, but they understand how it operates in relation to the whole, it will be much more effective when it comes to productivity and quality of workmanship.

What Can You Do in Your Business?

What you can go do is simple. Sit down with your team and make sure that they all understand the ultimate goal and the objectives that you have for the grand scheme of things. Once they understand that, talk with each person (or individual team) and communicate what their contribution to the project is and how their part is important.

If everyone knows what they are responsible for, and they all know what everyone else is responsible for, it creates an atmosphere of self-motivation and quality – and those are the building blocks of a truly great business.

So what are your thoughts? Have you used this or any team building strategy before? What were your results?

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