Creating a Winning Team Sparks NV

Note: The following article contains material from Beau Hamilton's Team Building seminar, which is conducted for the collision repair industry and approved by ASA's Automotive Management Institute (AMI) for continuing-education credits.

By Beau Hamilton
4/1/1998

When you assemble a number of men and women to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men and women all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests and their selfish views. From such an assembly, can a perfect production be expected?" - Benjamin Franklin.

When you look at it that way, it's no wonder that teamwork plays such an important role in how smoothly - or not - a business runs. If everyone in your shop isn't working toward a common goal - if the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing - it stands to reason that your production, profits and people won't be optimized. It also stands to reason that if your employees don't feel a part of something, they probably won't have any loyalty toward you or your business, either.

So what can you do to create a sense of teamwork - of camaraderie - in your employees? You can start by considering the following seven principles of team building.

1. The first rule for any effective team is mutual trust and respect between all team members.

I rarely say never, but in this case, I will say that a company will never have total teamwork without trust. Trust is the foundation for ...