Team Skills

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First, in order to do that, it is important to understand how a team can be successful, what creates an achievement culture and which behavioursshould or should not be followed. A team is, at its core, a group of individuals that, working together with a same goal and sharing the responsibility, will try to achieve better or bigger goals thanwhat they could reach alone. In a team, the most important element to have is trust. Trust is based on credibility, reliability and intimacy, but also on a lack of self-orientation (2). A team needsall its members to work for a common goal. In that sense, it is capital to avoid attitudes that will erode the intimacy and increase the sense of self-orientation such as being authoritarian ormanipulative. The team will quickly fall apart. However, encouraging everyone´s role and ideas into the team and handling conflicts early on are good attitudes to have to maintain a high trust in the teamand achieve success.
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Equally important to understand team dynamics, it is to knowourselves better, to avoid falling in our own prejudices and acquired behaviours which will compromise our success. For that, transactional analysis (3) is a very good tool. In ego theory, we all havethree states: Parent (which is the taught concepts of our life or the teachings received when we were little and we have never challenged), Child (which would be our emotional responses to externalstimuli) and the Adult (which would be our rational self). The optimal state is the Adult state, which allows us to make rational decisions. However, the other two states can be useful too. For example, theChild is the one that controls creativity. The Parent can lead and guide other team members and can be a useful tool for the team leader. What we need to avoid, however, is a “contamination” of the...