A Blog a Day (#23)

TEAM

This blog will be about teams in business - more specifically manufacturing or service industry. We have been hearing this term during the last quarter of the last century. Maybe earlier, the industry believed more in individuals carrying out tasks and responsibilities assigned to them. So we had people saying, "No, this is not my job." We may still see such comments from staff in government and bureaucracies where individuals have to complete their assigned tasks.

Back in the 1980's trade union leaders were powerful and there were many instances where they could hold an organisation to ransom by demanding wage rises. I am not against unions in organisations, since before unions were formed, the employers took undue advantage of workmen and exploited them. We had instances of coal-mine workers who worked in unsafe conditions and died because the employer was more interested in mining away all the coal without leaving anything for holding the tunnels.

Be that as it may, the discussion about Teams cannot be complete without mentioning the influence of Japanese management concepts in business.  Toyota Production System, Total Productive Maintenance, and TQM came to be adopted by industry from the 90's and they brought with it the concept of team work. Many engineers in the industry who would work on their own now had to work in a team and contribute so that the team output would be much more than the sum total of what each individual could do. It also brought in the need for implementing improvements in processes and complementary skills were brought to the team meetings thereby ensuring that the implementation of improvements were successful. In any team sport we see a team comprises of people with unique and often complementary skills and they all come together during the game to ensure victory for the team. Business organisations have emulated the concept from sport and have been quite successful.