Managers, the secrets of creating true team spirit

For a manager, one of the most delicate responsibilities is to create team spirit among his employees. When it succeeds, people interact better, are more selfless and collaborative, and infuse more energy into their work because they feel part of something bigger than their own personal orchard.

Team building workshops, reorganisation of work spaces, group incentive systems, motivational meetings, fun events. The list of all possible actions to create a collective identity would be very long. It is a challenge that is not as easy as it appears because, no matter how hard the manager may try, if individuals do not perceive the sense and deep motives of a common belonging, it becomes difficult to convince them. On the contrary, the more one tries from above to 'team up', the more the individuals feel the forcing and experience the team concept as a manipulation.

One has to be aware that it is not always the totality of people who answer to a manager that constitutes a team. It does not count that we periodically take a lunch, a trip or a convention all together. It does not count that we all attend a thousand meetings together, that we have cordial and collaborative relationships, that we have a nice boss who gives us coach talks. We are a team for objective reasons intrinsic to the nature of our work. There are activities that presuppose a strong team identity and others that can be done very well without a marked 'team effect'. Despite the romantic emphasis and motivational rhetoric on the concept of 'team' and the sports metaphor of the locker room, it is not necessarily the case that a 'low team intensity' job is less stimulating or less exciting.

In order to understand how much our profession is a 'team' profession and how much it is therefore worthwhile for a manager to emphasise and enhance this aspect in the management of his or her employees, it is necessary to analyse the characteristics of a professional activity from at least three points of view.

Interdependence. The quality and value of my work depends on the quality and value of other people's work. This is true for example for someone working in a hospital ward or a factory, it is less true for the group of Latin teachers in a high school or for any sales team. Often in sales networks the team effect is artificially constructed to provide emotional or playful stimuli ("us against the competition", "us sellers of product x against fellow sellers of product y", "us against stingy and mistrustful customers", "us against the crisis", etc.), but when the lights of the convention go out, the profoundly individual nature of the work remains. In such a context it is useless if not counterproductive for a manager to invest too much in the 'team effect'.