Team Weak Link

The role of an optometrist is very important in shaping the purpose of the team early on in the practice. Managers in eye care can differentiate teams into teams that recommend things, teams that make things, teams that run things. Obviously, for teams that make things, they are given a degree of freedom that allows them to apply an intrapreneurial behavior whereas for teams that run things their roles are predetermined by the Optometrist based on a set of rules that can be determined and distributed accompanied by a set of guidelines and expected outcomes. For intrapreneurial teams, things might be quite different, since most successful intrapreneurial teams form their purposes when they are confronted with an opportunity by their higher management. The optometrist in each of the cases provides the team with either the practice performance expectation, challenges, and results or leaving to the team enough flexibility to develop a shared commitment to a specific purpose, set goals, and develop its work approach to build upon the opportunity being discovered. No doubt the worth of a group is the sum of individual contributions by groupmates, however, the worth of a team is higher than the amount of a teammate’s contribution and it accounts for the individual contribution of teammates and the collective enormous capability.

Teams with predetermined roles for each member distributed by the optometrist may lack shared commitment. Those teams are more like working groups that perform as individuals. Members in those groups don’t take responsibilities other than their own. Weak links in such teams are regarded as the root for bad team performance. Weak links put stress on other strong team members forcing them to leave their positions to come to the help or just complain to their manager. Team managers tend to try to improve weak links performance as a first step, then they try to reassign them other tasks, but if the weak link proves not to be progressing he ought to be replaced. In this case, a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and a team that wants to increase its performance needs not just to have strong links but also to completely eliminate weak links.

The importance of a team is shared commitment that turns a team into a powerful unit of collective performance. The capabilities of each team member no matter how strong or weak they are, are developed through training, education, and mentoring. Weak links are not the team’s performance limiters where team members have a shared commitment toward a common purpose, a set of performance goals, and an approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. Moreover, the team aspires to something greater than its members could achieve individually, and in this case, a chain is stronger than its weakest link.