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May 1991
TEAMWORK: AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH
By
Alan Youngs
Captain
Lakewood, Colorado, Police Department
and
Eric K. Malmborg
Management Consultant
Boulder, Colorado
As humans, we strive for individuality. We pride ourselves
on the unique talents and problem-solving capabilities each of
us possesses. Our individual capabilities, when combined with
those of others in a professional setting, work to build a
successful team. However, effective teamwork does not come
easily; it requires coordination, cooperation, and communication
on the part of all involved.
THE NEED TO WORK TOGETHER
At times, individual needs and goals, as well as an
inability to communicate effectively, interfere with effective
team building. And, while the diverse skills of several persons
working together can solve problems, combining these human
efforts successfully to achieve a goal poses difficult
challenges. Nonetheless, as society becomes more complicated
and as individuals become more specialized, effective teamwork
becomes an essential requirement to solve common problems.
For example, the problems facing society as a whole
increasingly require the input and joint coordinated action of
the police and the community. As these problems become more
complex, the consequences of ineffective solutions increase
correspondingly. The recent upsurge of gang activities in
metropolitan areas is only one problem that points to the need
for a team effort.
Then, there is the realization that police departments are
becoming more "civilianized," another emerging trend. More and
more, civilians perform many jobs within police departments that
do not require the training and skills of professional police
officers. For this transformation to work, the barriers between
these two groups must come down.
Therefore, police departments must begin to promote team
building within their ranks. Then, the strategy can be adapted
to work with members of the community. As Sir Robert Peel, the
first commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, pointed out
in the first part of the 19th century, "The police are the
people and the people are the police."
PROPERTIES OF SUCCESSFUL TEAMS
What are the secrets of successful teams? Why do some
teams achieve remarkable success, while others fail or are
assigned to mediocrity? To find the answers, Dr. Carl Larson, a
former Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Denver, and
Dr. Frank M. J. LaFasto, Vice-President of Human Resource
Planning and Development for a private health care corporation,
conducted a 3-year study of individual teams and their
achievements. (1) By interviewing a wide range of teams,
including a space shuttle team and a championship football team,
they discovered a surprising consistency in the characteristics
of an effective team.
Larson and LaFasto identified eight properties of
successful teams:
1) A clear, elevating goal--a worthwhile and challenging
objective that is compelling enough to create team
identity and has clear consequences connected with its
achievement;
2) A results-driven structure--a team design that is
determined by the objective and supported by clear
lines of responsibility, open communication, fact-based
judgments, and methods of providing individual
performance feedback;
3) Competent team members--members who possess the
essential skills and abilities to accomplish the
objective;
4) A unified commitment--a team goal that is given a
higher priority than any individual objective and
inspires members to devote whatever effort is necessary
to achieve success;
5) A collaborative climate--a common set of guiding values
that allows members to trust each other;
6) Standards of excellence--high standards that motivate
members to constantly strive to improve performance;
7) External support and recognition--necessary resources
and support required to accomplish team objectives,
including recognition and incentives; and
8) Principled leadership--leaders who take the
necessary actions to inspire commitment, reward
superior performance, delegate meaningful levels
of responsibility, and confront inadequate
performance. (2)
BUILDING AN EFFECTIVE TEAM
The Lakewood, Colorado, Police Department recently
implemented an innovative approach to help its management-level
officers understand and develop a more successful team approach
to problem solving. Faced with the growing realization that
well-executed team-work is required for effective law
enforcement, and successful participation in the community team
as a whole, the department developed a strategy to train its
management personnel to become more effective team participants.
Department administrators realized that traditionally, law
enforcement training has been confined to the classroom. And,
although classroom training provides the opportunity to listen
to instructors and exchange ideas with fellow students, it is
not the ideal place to experience and assimilate what is being
taught. Oftentimes, when students return to the work setting,
they do not have the opportunity to practice what they learned.
Therefore, hands-on experience should reinforce classroom
instruction.
This is particularly true when a group of individuals
endeavors to increase its ability to work as a team. In
essence, the group learns to be a team by actually working
together. Team training in an environment that is new,
unfamiliar, adventurous, and challenging allows each individual
to see the resources available in others, discover creative ways
to solve problems by using these resources, and develop the
communication skills and the trust needed to operate
successfully as a team.
This is why department administrators decided to take their
team building effort beyond the classroom. Working with a
management development organization, the department developed a
workshop designed to improve communication, increase team
effectiveness, and enhance the leadership capabilities,
creativity, and vision of its managers. The goal of the
workshop was to build an effective management team through
reinforcement of classroom training.
TEAM BUILDING WORKSHOP
To begin, mandatory attendance at the team building
workshop was required of every police supervisor from the rank
of sergeant to the chief of police, as well as every civilian
supervisor. The participants were divided randomly in teams,
although each team did include persons of every rank. The
program was repeated four times during a 6-month period.
Day one of the workshop concentrated on various practical
exercises designed to assess each participant's current ability
to work with others and to reinforce team building. This also
enabled the participants to learn firsthand the dimensions of
high performance teams as identified by Larson and LaFasto. By
the end of the day, these exercises surfaced issues such as:
* The importance of trust and clear communications
* Creative problem solving and the impact of
organizational structure on that process
* The importance of clearly defined goals and the need for
everyone to work toward those goals
* Role clarity and understanding individual abilities, and
* The need for team leaders to focus on team goals and to
maintain the direction of the team.
For example, in one of the more-simplified exercises, teams
worked together to get all their members up and over a 12-foot
wall safely. Each team member displayed different strengths
and/or weaknesses when encountering the wall. In order for the
team to be successful, team members needed to recognize and
adapt these individual abilities to obtain a common goal. Team
members had to align themselves with the goal, communicate with
others, place trust in team members, and use creative thinking
to solve the problem at hand.
In-depth discussions followed team exercises. Participants
voiced the trust and confidence they felt at the end of each
exercise and discussed experiencing, or not experiencing, these
same feelings on the job.
These exercises and discussions explored a number of issues
critical to team performance. Through this process, team
members became aware of their individual abilities to work as
part of a team and learned team skills that could be put to use
in their individual assignments.
During the second day of the workshop, participants "took
stock" of the first day's activities and examined personal and
team accomplishments. Workshop coordinators also presented a
review of the characteristics of high performance teams,
according to the work of Larson and LaFasto, and shared the
results of a feedback instrument that each team member filled
out before the workshop began. After reviewing the feedback and
assessing the information, teams focused on areas that they
thought were the most critical to team development and the
individual plans that should be used on the job to accomplish
team goals.
FOLLOWUP
In a followup study, participants identified the most
significant things they learned from the workshop. Some of
their comments were:
* "A team can work together to achieve goals and
objectives"
* "I was impressed with all the different ways that a task
can be solved when different members of the team provide
input"
* "Team functioning hands-on is far more effective than
mere talking or working"
* "Free, creative thinking should be encouraged within an
organization for effective problem solving"
* "The strength of our team was impressive."
Other benefits of this experience included the formation of
a committee to promote and facilitate communication within the
department and the establishment of a citizens' police academy
to increase community awareness of police operations and to
provide an opportunity for police and community members to
develop a team relationship.
CONCLUSION
Effective teamwork is critical to any organization.
But, a team is only as strong as its members. The
"out-of-the-classroom" learning experience assisted team members
to identify the elements of teamwork and to communicate them to
others. It also helped them to recognize their individual
strengths and weaknesses.
This program also allowed the civilian personnel and
officers of the Lakewood Police Department to discover that each
member's individuality is an asset to building a team. And it
is that individuality, combined with coordination, cooperation,
and communication, that makes for a successful team.
FOOTNOTES
(1) Carl Larson and Frank M.J. LaFasto, "Teamwork--What
Must Go Right/What Can Go Wrong" (Newbury Park, California: Sage
Publications, 1989).
(2) Ibid, p. 8.