Cross-Functional Team Building

"Hey, get a team on that!" Is the battle cry of business for the new millennium.

More and more organizations have learned that the use of cross functional teams to solve problems and increase productivity and quality is vital to their success. Everywhere you turn, you hear about the use of teams, teamwork and team building to accomplish organizational goals and objectives.

To make the concept of cross functional teams work effectively, organizations need to reevaluate the way they communicate, learn and solve problems. In the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your organization's ability to learn faster than its competition.

Develop this advantage through the creation of a Alearning organization. Crystal Clear Concepts, Inc., can help you draw the blueprints and implement a plan for your company where people expand their capacity to create the truly desired results, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspirations are set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together. We help fuse these features into a coherent body of theory and practice, making the whole of an organization more effective than the individual parts. The results? Increased productivity, quality and profits.

It's easy to confuse team spirit with teamwork or believe that putting people together will create a productive team. There is more to developing high performance teams than gathering people and building enthusiasm. People have to be trained how to work together as a team, use a problem solving model, recognize the phases of team development and how to develop skills in facilitation and team leadership.

Not all organizations have embraced the concept of team development. As children, we learned that two heads were better than one. However, as adults, we are constantly evaluated and rewarded on individual effort, initiative and independent thinking. In today's competitive workplace, people are rewarded for work in their own individual box or department. In most cases, there is no motivation to move outside that box and solve problems that will truly impact the good of the organization as a whole. It's easier to protect individual turf by pointing fingers and blaming those outside the box. It is also one of the reasons that while teams have proven very successful from middle management down, it is still very difficult to get teams functioning smoothly within top management.

Smart organizations have learned that using teams does not solve all their problems. Sometimes, it only replaces an old set of problems with a new set. But, done right, teams increase efficiency, improve accountability and morale which leads to higher productivity and quality.

Click on Team building and Learning Organizations to find out about these two innovative programs.