Teamwork vs Taskwork: Which is best for your team?

Do you feel your team is pulling in all different directions?

Are team members too focused on their workloads?

Is everyone ‘busy’ getting stuff done and checking off to-do lists?

What may be causing this is too much focus on ‘taskwork’ and not enough focus on ‘teamwork’.

Teams in not-for-profit and social enterprises are under more pressure to do more with less. This tends to focus team members on doing tasks and checking off to-do lists.  With a focus on taskwork, a team’s performance can diminish. Teams can lose their collective advantage. A focus on taskwork pushes individuals to take on more work and not leverage the effectiveness of team collaboration. This leads to teams working harder, not smarter.

The prescription for doing more with less is to leverage team collaboration to enable team effectiveness. This means focussing on ‘teamwork’ and integrating ‘taskwork’ into effective team processes. So it's not so much ‘teamwork vs taskwork’ it's more like ‘teamwork and then taskwork’. Increased team effectiveness will enable your team to do more, and better taskwork. There will be more collaboration, shared workloads, innovation, adaptation, and better outcomes.

To shift from taskwork to teamwork:

1. assess your team's effectiveness,
2. diagnose which aspects of teamwork need improvement, and
3. take action to invest your team development efforts to increase effectiveness.

You can start assessing your team’s effectiveness using the Collective Advantage Team Assessment Tool. This tool will highlight your team's strengths and weaknesses and guide you on where to focus your efforts to improve team performance.

Improving your team’s ‘teamwork’ will provide you with a way to empower your team to do more with less and create greater impact. Take action now to make your team more effective. Start with the Collective Advantage Team Assessment Tool.