Meetings play a significant role in teamwork. The main reason for having meetings is to utilize the collective skills of a team while working on common problems. However, too often we experience meetings that in no way use these skills, where only one or a few people contribute or some managers seem to use the occasion as an opportunity to lay down the rules rather than utilize the resources of the team. The quality of meetings can usually be determined by how individuals either look forward to or dread the normal weekly or monthly get-together.
In many organisations, the quality of relationships between the managers and those they manage is so poor that effective teamwork just cannot get off the ground. Teamwork is unlikely to evolve if people cannot confide in or trust their manager, when they are afraid of him/her, or when their conversations are on a superficial level. Team work essentially solicits high-quality relationships. Asign of a low-quality relationship is that the leader often gets increasingly isolated from his team. He/she does not represent the views of...