No one likes to come up short. Failing stinks. If we aren’t careful, teamwork can lead to failure and the blame game. Most of us have seen one way this can happen – shared responsibility. Framed right, shared responsibility can help teams succeed and reach goals. Great sports teams do this all the time. There might be a star or leader or two but then there are quite a few role players. Everyone knows their responsibility and how it fits in with the overall success of the team. They are responsible for doing their job correctly so that the team will succeed. When I think of the opposite of this, I picture group projects from my school days. We’ve all been part of group projects and most of the time most of us dreaded them when they came up. There’s fighting over who the boss is, who does the work, who is pulling their weight and if the group succeeds it’s almost always because a small part of that group pulled the weight of the whole group. We can run into this in construction. When bidding a project, if several people are assigned one division, the bid is ripe for scope overlaps and gaps. We can overcome these issues by giving detailed assignments. We can also assign division success to one person with the support of others. In other words, accountability is established. With loosely shared responsibility, team members might feel loosely accountable for team success. Without accountability, failure creeps in pretty quickly.
The bottom line is that if not carefully planned and assigned, shared responsibility will lead to shared failure. Because there’s no detailed assignments, the blame game will ensue and correcting any issues will be difficult – “that wasn’t my job” and “that’s not my job to fix” discussions will follow. Avoid those discussions by defining and assigning roles will minimize confusion and maximize team unity, synergy and success.
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