Working with Teams in the Workplace: A Personal Experience

Abstract

While working with a small-sized family-owned construction company, I had the
opportunity to work with teams to bring about a major change: to diversity the company’s
activities into real estate brokerage and management. The main advantage of teamwork was
sharing the workloads, while the main challenges and disadvantages were the difficulties
involved in sharing a vision and securing support across teams. Nevertheless, after these
disadvantages were overcome, it became relatively easy to build and maintain teams whose
members were united by a shared vision. Besides the disadvantages of teamwork, other
challenges to be overcome included unsupportive company culture, including a silo mentally
and a fixation on the top-down approach to management.

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Introduction

Working with teams can both be an exciting and traumatizing experience for
employees, depending on whether one is a team player or not. Regardless of the side of the
argument, team participation can benefit an individual, group/team, and the organization; for
example, it can increase employee engagement, innovation, productivity/performance, and
bring fresh perspectives. At the same time, it can create conflicts due to competing ideas and
dampen the morale of other employees, especially if the group has domineering personalities.
If unchecked and unmanaged properly, teams can disintegrate and affect the organization’s
overall performance. Usually, internal team challenges require a strong organizational culture
and committed leadership guided by shared goals. This paper details my experience working
with teams in a small-sized construction company. I will also describe the advantages and
setbacks I encountered working in teams and how the team learned as a group and forged
ahead in the team-building process.

Working with Teams in the Workplace: A Personal Experience
While working with a small-sized family-owned construction company, I had the
opportunity to work with teams to bring about a major change: diversify the company’s
portfolio by adding real estate brokerage and management. I was part of the guiding team
whose main responsibility was to plan, implement, and monitor the diversification initiative.
As the guiding team, we worked with several other teams within the company: management,
sales & marketing, and design, among others. The economic slowdown associated with the
Covid-19 pandemic necessitated the need to diversify.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Working in and Across Teams
Consistent with the literature on the topic, as the pioneers of the diversification
initiative, the biggest challenges and disadvantages we faced were creating urgency for the
change and securing support and buy-in across the company, including senior management

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(Neill, 2018). As pioneers, we felt that the company’s problem was obvious and almost crisis-
like: the company was struggling to meet its financial obligations timely, including paying
employee salaries. As a result, employee morale was at an all-time low, and many employees
were leaving the company already. Because of these facts, we assumed that the management
team would buy the diversification idea quickly. However, we soon learned that we were
wrong in our assumption and realized that we needed to work very hard to secure buy-in from
senior management and from across the organization. In addition, we needed to get everyone
to see the sense of urgency with which the change needed to be implemented.
Despite the above disadvantages, the advantages of teamwork were clear to us. The
main advantage of teamwork was that it made lighter the tasks of securing buy-in and
creating urgency. For example, because one of the guiding team members was a senior
accountant, she helped with compiling hard financial evidence detailing how dire the
company’s financial situation was; evidence that was shared with the company’s Directors
and senior managers.

Overcoming the Challenges and Building the Guiding Team
Fortunately for us as pioneers, we overcame the above challenges primarily by having
a very clear vision of what the diversification move would achieve for the company and by
communicating that vision clearly and relentlessly. Having secured buy-in and created a
sense of urgency, we felt it was time to build a guiding team to lead the effort. We believed a
team was better placed to champion the change than the initial handful of pioneers who
believed strongly in need for change.
We, the pioneers, were careful to get several things right in building the team. First,
only the right people would be brought on board. The right candidate for the team possessed
the following qualities: a passion for the envisioned change; official authority and leadership
skills, including vision, persuasion, and the ability to motivate; knowledge of the company’s

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internal workings; credibility and influence within the company; and relevant knowledge of
the company’s external environment. Secondly, once the initial team was operational, it was
necessary to keep the team re-energized and fresh by continually bringing in desirable people
while occasionally letting go of those who ceased being useful and committed to the change
effort waned. Finally, as the diversification effort continued to be implemented, it was found
helpful to form smaller teams at the lower levels of the company. For example, within the
sales and marketing department, a small team was formed to focus exclusively on marketing
the company’s new venture.

The Role of the Company’s Culture

In building the guiding and other teams, two aspects of the prevailing company
culture featured prominently: a silo mentality and the top-down approach to decision-making.
Indeed, most organizations are characterized by the silo mentality and a culture of distrust;
these are barriers that often prevent the various units of the organization from cooperating
effectively, to the detriment of the organization as a whole (Cilliers & Greyvenstein, 2012).
Our company was no different in this regard. Therefore, to ensure broad-based support for the
change effort, the guiding team was structured in such a way to ensure that the company’s
various units were represented. The idea was to get members to appreciate how the company
functions as a unit.
Meanwhile, in conceiving the diversification move, we were going up against the top-
down manner in which things were usually done at the company. As in most other
organizations, the prevalent practice was that senior managers would make decisions and
then pass them down to middle-level managers and supervisors to implement them. Such an
approach to management does not consider that today’s business problems are more complex,
and addressing them calls for more collaborative efforts (Erdogan, Anumba, Bouchlaghem, &

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Nielsen, 2005). Also, some problems demand emergent, bottom-up interventions such as the
one we initiated.

Maintaining a Functioning Cooperative Team

Besides composing the team so that it was representative of the company, the
following steps were necessary for maintaining a functioning cooperative team: leading by
example and injecting energy into the team. Given the unprecedented nature of the change
effort, it was important for the initiators of the effort and team leaders to lead by example by
demonstrating enthusiasm, commitment, trust, and teamwork. The team leaders demonstrated
their enthusiasm, commitment, trust, and teamwork in several ways, including always
attending team meetings punctually, always completing their assigned tasks ahead of the next
meeting, and following up on team members between meetings.
Meanwhile, team leaders continually used several strategies to inject energy into the
team. These included recognizing and rewarding team members who contributed
exceptionally toward the change effort. This was necessary given that all team members were
members of staff who already had full-time responsibilities. Indeed, staff with full-time
responsibilities are known to invest minimum effort in additional team-related tasks,
especially if they know that their efforts will go unrewarded (Francis, Oaya, & Mambula,
2020). The other strategy used to keep the team energized was to continually recruit new
team members to replace those who had grown weary or had otherwise lost their initial
enthusiasm.

The Mutual Goals Shared by Team Members

All team members had a common vision for the company, a vision they shared clearly
and relentlessly with everyone else in the company. They envisioned that in five years, the
company would have transformed from a financially insecure company dependent on one line
of business to a diversified, financially stable, and profitable company better positioned to

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weather economic storms. The company would have a realty division and the current
construction business. Consistent with Kotter & Cohen’s (2012) idea of bold change visions,
each division would be a market leader in its line of business. The company’s employees
would be highly-skilled, experienced, well-paid, and highly motivated. Employee turnover
would be low as staff would be highly satisfied with the company’s work environment. Team
members believed five years would be adequate to implement the change. Indeed, large-scale
organizational change should be implemented neither too fast nor too slowly (Kotter &
Cohen, 2012). If change is implemented too slowly, inertia and corrosion are likely to occur.
On the other hand, doing it too fast puts the organization in flux: too rapid change that no one
can keep track of.

Conclusion

Working in teams is as challenging as it can be exciting. The greatest setback I faced
working with teams in a small-sized construction company was securing buy-in from the top
leadership to support team-based activities and initiatives. The C-Suite was unwilling to
support the diversification idea our team proposed and, therefore, was unwilling to support
and fund it. Nevertheless, the main advantage of teamwork is that people working in groups
can lobby and win support easily while working together than as individuals. Having mutual
goals shared by team members also clearly played an important part in securing buy-in and
the initiative’s overall success. The management was ready to fund and support the project
once it realized that all members shared the same ideology: pushing the company forward.
This was, however, derailed by the organization’s silo-mentality and top-down culture.

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References

Cilliers, F., & Greyvenstein, H. (2012). The impact of silo mentality on team identity: An
organizational case study. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 1-9.
Erdogan, B., Anumba, C., Bouchlaghem, D., & Nielsen, Y. (2005). Change management in
construction: The current context. 21st Annual ARCOM Conference (pp. 1085-1095).
London: Association of Researchers in Construction Management.
Francis, F., Oaya, Z., & Mambula, C. (2020). Reward System as a Strategy to Enhance
Employees Performance in an Organization. Archives of Business Research, 8(6),
156-164.
Kotter, J. P., & Cohen, D. S. (2012). The Heart of Change. Boston: Harvard Business Review
Press.
Neill, M. S. (2018). Change Management Communication: Barriers, Strategies & Messaging.
Public Relations Journal, 12(1), 1-26.