The very best salesperson or marketing director in the entire world can do very little to change your company’s culture and direction. No matter how skilled or experienced, no one man or woman is powerful enough to reorient the course of a business as a larger whole; instead, team members need to learn how to work together in order to have any hope of succeeding in our economic circumstances. Unfortunately, many people do not come on board a company having learned these skills already, so it’s up to business leaders to reteach the key concepts of teamwork and unity if a given organization is to achieve its vision.
It’s time to ask yourself some of the the hard questions: is your company’s culture one that cultivates cooperation, or do your compensation and incentive plans necessarily divide? Every company has a culture, either intentionally or by accident–but it’s there, and it affects your employees’ working habits every day whether you know it or not. The first action to take to ensure the creation of a team-building atmosphere is to establish cooperation as one of your company’s core values and to communicate this constantly to your people. If you haven’t set in stone the ideas of cooperation and collaboration as part of who your company is, how do you expect the members of your team to abide by them?
Now that your vision is established, you’ll need to implement the tools that the front line will be utilizing to work together. It depends on the industry of course, but for many business this boils down to your sales software and your marketing project management software. Are you using the very latest in collaboration software, project management suites that emphasize cooperation and easy internet-based access to your workflows and data, or are you still using an out-of-date copy of Microsoft Project that’s not geared for sharing and collaborating? The execution of your teamwork ideals is just as important as the planning side, and keeping everyone on MS Project and other local programs without investing in sales and project management solutions that show you’re serious about collaboration can undermine your efforts.
But in the end, whether you subscribe to a cloud-based MS Project alternativee such as Workzone or Basecamp or not, it’s your attitude and integrity as a leader and example that will determine the defectiveness of your teambuilding mentality. People can see a hypocrite from a mile away, and if you’re just looking out for number one without pitching into the team effort, it will show. With an honest and open approach, a clear and articulate vision for your company, and of course the right tools, you can build a team that will be far more powerful together than they ever were apart.
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