A team is but a collection of different people with varied skills and ambitions which work towards achieving a common goal whereas a group is an amalgam of people said S.G. Anantharaman, Corporate Trainer, while delivering a BL Club guest lecture on Team Work presented by Central Bank of India at Dr AER MBA College at Tirupati.
He said the outcome of team work is more than the sum of parts and if one performs and others don’t, they will collectively fail.
He emphasised this point through an activity where few students were asked to draw one part of an elephant on the board, which went terribly wrong finally. With many funny moments cropping up during this activity, he explained the nuances of the concept of team work through its outcome.
He said the elephant is an odd shaped animal. There was lack of team work in the group as everyone independently drew one part without consulting the other. He emphasised that there was a lack of vision and coordination and planning among the participants with detailing of the assigned task. The outcome also showed that there was no direction or delegation of work from the leader and finally no training or assessment of skills required to accomplish the task was undertaken.
He finally asked a student who knew how to draw an elephant and said that it looked much better than the previous one because it was assigned to a person who possessed the skill, with detailed direction to accomplish the task. In team work, it is not necessary that everybody should do everything at any given point of time, he said. Delegation of work to the right people will also help extract the best out of a team, he added.