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.