The overall success of a team depends on whether it functions as a whole. A collaborative team works together and communicates.
Transparency of work lends itself to communication among team members and across teams. Communication should span from the CEO, to top executives, to lower ranks of employees. With transparency, nothing will be missed. Having continuous access to updates is vital.
Within a collaborative team, assignments can be shared. For example, if one team member has too much work on his or her plate, a fellow team member can voluntarily pick up that task or the busier team member can re-assign the task to someone who isn’t as busy. Having someone take the initiative to take over someone else’s task is excellent since work will be completed quicker.
Instead of viewing yourself as a single person on a team, think of yourself as someone who does work within a team. Your team members can feed you work and swap tasks with you so no work is lost or overlooked, therefore risk of data loss or re-work is avoided.
With collaborative teams, communication is key. Raise awareness to struggles, issues or concerns so members can work more efficiently and better together. It is also beneficial to communicate what is working and to give status updates so everyone is on the same page.
Typically, a collaborative team executes work more quickly, and can easily provide each other coverage in case of absence of team members due to vacation or employee attrition. Any team member can pick up the work right where the other team member left off. The overall objective of the collaborative team is to reduce the total risk to your drug development by decreasing time (and cost) to run the gauntlet and produce high quality products and submissions to the FDA.
The more team members know, the better the work will be executed.
Do you have the systems and processes in place to foster the creation of a collaborative team? Contact us to learn more about one way we are redefining the team structure for the pharmaceutical industry.