24 Facets of Teamwork Training: From the Cubicle Culture to Manufacturing

ROCHESTER, NY - On balance, businesses today are more casual: dress codes are more relaxed, work hours are often flexible, and workers have greater autonomy. The open settings of today's business may promote a more relaxed workforce, but at what cost? According to organizational effectiveness consultant Jim Davis, "While today's more relaxed and more open business settings can promote camaraderie, more autonomy and greater flexibility, this can be good for workers, but in the grand scheme of things, can actually work to the detriment of the team. There can be an intrinsic flaw in businesses where workers have greater autonomy: often, there is less emphasis on teamwork and consequently, what often results is decreased productivity. It has been said that the sum is greater than the whole of its parts and this adage could not more aptly describe team culture. While there are definite advantages to a more relaxed business setting, there is an even greater need today to focus on how individual workers can band together to form a highly optimized, high performance team."

According to Davis, regardless of the industry or work environment, the best barometer for effectiveness can be measured by how well employees' routines and planning are in alignment. From telemarketers, to assembly lines, from healthcare to government, small businesses to large businesses, the greatest benchmark of success hinges on building and maintaining an empowered, optimized and high performance team.

A veteran worker with over 30 years experience with Xerox, Jim Davis has learned the secrets of high performance teams. Utilizing his experiences in building and sustaining high performance teams, Davis has developed a plan for focusing the combined energy of workers into a common culture - a teamwork culture.

Davis maintains that the real key to creating exceptional teams hinges on teamwork development, "For more than thirty years of work in a Fortune 100 company, I focused on building high performance teams. One particular team was the first industrial staff to sustain four consecutive months of zero defects on an assembly line. How did we do it? With good intentions and time, we learned how to reach a common vision with clearly defined goals. Then, we would take small steps that built up to a big goal. I found that when groups understood their unique personal qualities and skills in a teamwork setting, they were quicker to collaborate on strategies to reach a larger goal. What separated the teams that achieved the goal and remained working to their optimum potential and those that did not was the teamwork development."

Based on best practices from his experiences, Davis noted that the pattern of success was like polishing the facets of a diamond - recognizing that regardless of a team's cohesiveness or lack thereof, potential exists at the root of any team. By focusing on potential and taking concrete action steps to develop and polish the individual facets of each team member, Davis found that even in situations where teams lacked focus, direction, or teamwork, teams could learn how to maximize their effectiveness and meet and even exceed goals that may have once seemed insurmountable.

Drawing from his team development experiences, Davis developed df24PLUS® a systematic approach to team development. Ideal Diamond Telemapping, the core component of df24PLUS®, begins with rough facets of a diamond (potential) that continues to the ideal level (potential, which is cut, polished and put to good practical use). Each rough diamond facet contains defects or barriers that cloud a particular situation or condition and those barriers are removed. As the barriers are removed diamond facets are cut and polished through practical knowledge attainment and practical use, realistic goals are thereby established. Using this method, smaller goals become much clearer and lead up to a larger goal. The diamond facet approach centers on taking small, concrete