How To Improve Teamwork Through Shared Responsibility

April 26, 2017

In the effort to boost work productivity and improve work relationships, businesses and corporations are dreaming to create empowered teams as working units for their companies. In line with these efforts, task delegation and accountability become more diffused as teams are created within a company. As a result, the lines of accountability may become more obscured.

To ensure that our team’s tasks are done and that responsible persons are focused in working for a project, we still need to keep in mind that accountability is needed as a shared responsibility for the collective output that the team is required to achieve. Having the mentality that the result of a task is a sum of the entire team’s effort will help us maintain good team behavior.

Benefits of Having Shared Responsibility

Being able to contribute to a group task with complete support from all team members is just one of the definite benefits that we can get from shared responsibility. Mutual support from all members is the key to be able to establish great teamwork. The tasks done by the team are mostly interdependent and the quality of output is usually affected by each member’s work. For greater results, we need the help from each member. Establishing team accountability will help us regulate the pressure for the team members to participate collectively since every member will be held accountable for the output of the task.

Accountability in Teams

High performing teams manages to hold each other accountable for task results. They contribute and work on the task collectively and do not practice pointing fingers once there are bottlenecks and other problems with the task. Mediocre teams who are dependent on their leaders hold the team leaders accountable for any team failure while non-performing teams usually has no one to count on when tasks flop. Team accountability is an important factor that determines the team member’s behavior when faced with team failure.

Why be accountable?

A healthy team relationship must have accountability. Whenever problems occur within our team, accountability allows the team leader to properly identify what went wrong with the task. The leader can then be able to address the problem at hand and all members of the team will be able to create solutions for the issues better and faster.

If a member is held accountable for certain roles and tasks in the team, that responsibility will require him to be more thorough with his work. Most members of the team become more mindful of the work output’s quality that they contribute ideas to the task that will improve it further without being asked. A shared responsibility for the task at hand, entices proactive participation from the team members.

Whenever a task goes out of hand, accountability requires the team to collectively fix the problem. They do not just rely on their leader; they offer a hand to fix the issue. Without accountability, your team won’t be able to fully develop teamwork. The need to work collectively towards a common goal is a function that needs to be fulfilled by a fully functional team.

Having dynamic team building Melbourne activities and leadership events that explores the importance of shared responsibility within the team will allow everyone to value members of the team who are working together towards a common goal. Click here to check the great team events from our website.