Can't We All Just Get Along: Being a Team Player by Richard Taylor Edwards

One of the great lies of the late 20th and early 21st century is that we all should like each other. Nothing could be more absurd than this touchy-feely nonsense. You can no more determine who you like or dislike than you can change the colour of your skin, it's an absurd admonition.

Which is why the phrase at the top there is 'get along' not like or love one another (save that for Sundays and the vicar). In fact, drop that last verb altogether: given the state of sexual discrimination laws in the country today stating that you love all people is unlikely to impress the recruitment agency. All too few people are prepared to note the difference between the Christian ideal of Agape and the more direct Eros, which is what gets people into trouble.

What is wanted in the modern workplace, and interviewers will harp on about it, is team work. The theoretical basis goes all the way back to Adam Smith and his writings on a pin factory but the essence is that different people develop different skills and only by working together can the whole task be achieved. No one is asking that the national and regional sales managers love each other (in either sense) but that they will indeed get along and create that necessary team.

The secret of this mystical thing, the successful team, is something that interviewers, recruiters and recruitment agencies will quiz you upon endlessly. Quite how do you go about creating one and more importantly to winning at the interview stage, how do you tell people you will?

Your words will have to be your words but the great managers, from Robert Townsend to Jack Welch all agree that it's about two things: empowerment and delegation.

For a team to work successfully they have to get along with each other, of course, and this is more a matter of politeness than anything else. But they need to be empowered, and that is where their manager comes in. Do they have the resources they need? The time, the tools, the training? Secondly, do they have the responsibility? Is how they do the job devolved down to that very team? Only by getting both of these things right will a team, however good in principle, actually work in practice. They must be both able to do the task and allowed to do it in the way they think best.

The manager's job, in construction, the automotive industry, or anywhere else, is to provide those two vital things so that a team can work together.

Richard Taylor Edwards, Managing Director of Talisman Executive Resourcing, the leading employment agency that offers jobs in the construction industry.

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