Implications of Teamwork

Abstract

OUR team has recently completed a course organised by Northern Region Staff Development which involves us in undertaking a twelve month teamwork project. The purpose and method of the project was determined by ourselves, to meet the needs of working in our particular situation, with the course staff acting as facilitators throughout the year. At present, we are engaged in producing a paper on the development of our project at the request of the Regional Staff Development Office.Yhat I have said so far will not be unfamiliar to many probation officers, as we recognise that we are one of a number of teams who have committed themselves to a specific teamwork approach in recent times and already papers have been produced outlining the development of individual projects. However, what interests me, as our own project develops, is the amount of interest this method of approach is generating within the Service and the far reaching implications for the Service if teams undertake a serious commitment to teamworking. It therefore seems important to try and begin to examine some of the more general implications, in view of the expansion of this particular approach.To begin with it cannot be denied that, because. of our imperfect knowledge and skills, there is a tendency within social work to board a current bandwaggon, to be seen to be keeping abreast of new thinking and in the hope that our work might be more effective. It seems clear to me that this element is apparent in the current interest in teamworking. But I feel there is more to it than this. At a time when the Probation Service has been involved in creating larger administrative units, with an elongated hierarchy and expanded administration departments, it is interesting that at office level, there has been a move to develop the probation team, which is generally a small and compact unit. It seems to me that these two developments are linked and that the latter represents, at fieldwork level, an attempt to use more clearly the team as a means of establishing identity and security at a personal level, whilst at the same time using the identifiable and understandable unit of the team to work out a clearer foundation for effective operation as a social worker.This leads me to point to the first implication for the Service of a teamwork approach and one which our team recognised early in our particular project. For if a team makes a decision to work as a collective unit, it of necessity turns in on itself critically to examine its methods of working. This very process leads to a sense of being exclusive and anyone who is not of the team can feel themselves an outsider. This is not necessarily a deliberate act but rather an inevitable development.The team becomes the resource in relation to the work undertaken and takes on its own collective life. Others will be referred to but anyone who has not shared in the process must be outside it.