In today’s organisation majority of teams are quite young in age – they are hard worker, fast, agile and ready to take risk. But most of the time we found that this young team cannot achieve the desired results to the level which they could actually achieve. What may be the problem? In 95% cases it is found that week communication, co-ordination among team members and trust deficit creates major problem which lead to rework, confusion and financial losses. Especially in manufacturing industry it has been indentified and established that most financial losses are due to some or other kind of communication gap among team members. A proposal engineer places the proposal without disclosing risk associated with it. Sales guys booking the orders with short delivery time without taking project manager into confidence. Performance of any organisation depends upon how team performs. Team need to be really strong, member should have strong bonding among themselves.
For a moment consider that you are pilot. You are either captain or first officer, how will you work? Will you hide any information from your partner while flying the air craft? Will your ego comes in between while help or giving guidance or in sharing doubts? No it will not. You will not jeopardize your and some odd 200 passenger’s life.
Plane crashes rarely happen in real life. Plane crashes are much more likely to be the result of an accumulation of minor difficulties and seemingly small malfunctioning. Do you know? The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. One of the pilots does something wrong that by itself is not an problem. Then one of them makes another error on top of that, which combine with first error, still this does not amount to catastrophe. But then they make a third error on the top of that, and then another and another and another, and it is the combination of all those errors that leads to disaster.
Above seven errors, furthermore, are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill. It’s not that the pilot has to negotiate some critical technical manoeuvre and fails. The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communications. One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. One pilot does something wrong, and other doesn’t catch the error. In 40% of the time, the two pilots have never flown together before, so they are not comfortable with each other.
So when you are working in a team, work like pilots. Don’t hide anything from your colleague, reply to their mails in time; please pick-up the calls – your colleague may have to discuss or inform you something urgent. It’s like a plan – if its crashes everyone will be killed. Your organisation may not grow; you may not get increments, management will not be happy with your team and at the end of the day it will impact your family life as well. Please remember you are pilots of your organisation, if you fail your organisation too will crash.