Team cooperation

Teamwork means that people work in unison to achieve the same result. No-one can work separately if they are part of an organisation aimed at achieving a single goal. Taking part in a challenge, giving help, with the aim of achieving a result together and with equal dignity is the spirit of cooperation, which becomes essential in the realisation of an event.

Industrialist Henry Ford used to say: ‘Getting together is a beginning, staying together is progress, working together is success.’

When I teach students at the Carlo Porta Institute in Milan, I dwell a lot on this concept:  the success of a project is never of the individual, but of the group. Even in an individual sport like golf, as a professional I can assure you that results are achieved through teamwork: the coach, the athletic trainer, the nutritionist and the mental coach. 

Going back to events, the skill of the meeting & event manager will be to operate in the team with the spirit of cooperation we mentioned before: hence the importance of sharing objectives within the team.

As well as within the team, cooperation is also important with stakeholders outside the team. I am thinking, for example, of event management in large hotels, where we collaborate with the different departments involved in the services required for the event.

In my team I have many long-standing, loyal partners; suppliers with whom I have established a relationship of trust. I also work with temporary collaborators, depending on the needs of the project. Often the recruitment and induction of new human resources into the project and their subsequent release are very delicate and have to be managed with particular care.

The specific context of human resources requires some special attention in setting up clear roles, responsibilities and relationships among team members, necessary performance levels and related measures and possibly an appropriate training and incentive and reward plan.

A collaborative and engaging environment should be created and maintained among project staff in order to strengthen commitment to the project and to foster the integration of skills.

The final outcome and success of the project itself depends on the adequacy of the quality and quantity of resources. 

Communicating is another fundamental aspect: the communicator (sender) must ensure that the information transmitted reaches the receiver and is received correctly and completely. It must not be implicit, distorted or filtered by the limitations of the channels and modes of transmission (formal written, formal or informal verbal, body language).

Effective communication is a critical success factor. In this regard, the Project Management Institute has found that projects carried out by organisations with high communication effectiveness meet budget and time constraints more than twice as often as others. In fact, projects are increasingly interdisciplinary and numerous stakeholders (internal and external to the organisation), with different cultures and technical backgrounds, usually take part into the implementation phase, operating by carrying out multiple activities related to each other by strict logical, physical and temporal interdependence constraints.

In conclusion, when selecting resources, in addition to skills, knowledge and experience, particular attention should be paid to personal skills aimed at team work.