Poor teamwork inhibits your small business, wastes potential and hurts your profitability. For example, instead of working toward a project’s goals, your employees might waste time fixing mistakes due to poor communication and ineffective organization. Your customers, staff and organization as a whole suffer from poor teamwork and its inefficient results.
Results will be subpar if roles are unclear. For instance, suppose everyone on your team wants to contribute ideas for an upcoming advertising campaign. The likely result is a hodgepodge promotion that lacks focus and a clear target. In contrast, if you task the most able workers with designing the campaign, directing the remaining employees to act as support staff, the resulting campaign will have a clear and consistent focus.
Tasks slip through the cracks if your team is poorly organized. For example, each member of your team might assume someone else is handling a vital task, but no one is. By the time your employees realize their mistake, it might be too late to repair the error. At the very least, they must waste time backtracking to handle the problem. An organized approach to project assignments prevents such oversights.
Doing the same job twice slows a project down. Suppose one member of your team likes to double-check everyone else’s work, even when it’s unnecessary. Instead of being a productive member of the team, he is slowing the workflow and damaging the morale of the team with his nosiness.
Poor teamwork can lead to grave mistakes. Suppose your customer service representatives don’t understand the details of a promotion because your sales department never explained it to them. When your customers contact your business to take advantage of the promotion, they encounter confused and misinformed staff. The sales promotion will fall on its face. Due to its lack of communication, your team wasted time and resources on a failed promotion. Worse, customers walked away with a bad impression of your business, the exact opposite of your intention.
Without an effective leader, your team might degrade into cliquish behavior. For example, longtime friends might conspire to reserve favored tasks for themselves, compromising the overall effectiveness of the team and destroying the morale of the other members. A strong leader overcomes cliques and infighting by assigning tasks based on ability and experience, rather than favoritism.
