Five Steps to Effective, High-Functioning Teams
Entrepreneurs will often reflect that the most difficult part of building their business was not managing employees or finances, marketing or sales, but working with their partner. Partnerships, with all the challenges of a marriage but without the pleasures, take commitment, patience and insight to be successful. The corporate world’s answer to the growing challenges of business seems to be a whole room full of partners -- that’s a Team. Although there have always been workplace teams, since the 1980’s their role in corporations has vastly increased. And although they can be highly effective, teams are not the panacea for inefficient organizations. Frustrated members and managers abound, because by all logic their teams should work, but they often don’t. The good news is that the solutions for effective, high-functioning teams are within your reach.
What is a team?
Katzenbach & Smith in Wisdom of Teams gave us a highly useful definition:
“A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and working approach for which they hold themselves accountable” 1
Work groups that are a collection of individuals, are not a team. Even a group attempting to collaborate on a joint project, Katzenback and Smith would call a “potential” team. A real team has a common purpose, goals and approach. When the team becomes committed to each others’ personal growth, then it can evolve to a true high performance team.
The norm in the workplace is the antithesis of the team: usually each individual must look out for their own interests, which makes team-building difficult.
Patrick Lencioni, author of the Five Dysfunctions of Teams, points out another hurdle typical in corporations. Managers and leaders often leave team issues untreated, hoping they will work themselves out without any heavy lifting, and now you’ve got a recipe for dysfunction. 2
Whether you are the manager charged with forming and supervising a team, or a member of the group, you can increase the performance of your team and your own job satisfaction by adhering to these five steps.
Five Steps to get there
- Once you have put together a balanced group of people whose experience, skills and personalities complement one another, your first question should be: what is your team’s purpose? Knowing the purpose is a pre-requisite to setting effective goals.
- Most of the time when a team does not function well, it is because they need to define, or re-define their goals, which are ever-evolving. Even if you started out with clear goals, over time they will need to be regularly revisited and revised.
- The next important step is to establish a system of accountability where each decision or goal has both the name of a person responsible and a date by which it will be accomplished. The system also needs a method of follow-up so that those accountable will know there is an expectation of follow-through.
- Follow-through is not enough for a team, however. The group as a whole must achieve results to remain effective.
- Finally, there must be a pause to celebrate success, and to acknowledge the work of the team and its members for their achievement.
Leading Organizations Accentuate the Positive to Define Team Purpose and Goals
Organizations as diverse as Roadway Express, GTE, and the US Navy are singing its praises, and Appreciative Inquiry is starting to get serious scrutiny.
In an article in Forbes magazine Joanne Gordon outlined how teamsters and managers at Roadway Express have evolved the use of appreciative inquiry to write business plans together.3 By appreciating what has worked for both groups in the past, they find mutual goals for their organization’s future.
The Leadership Summit of the US Navy is an application of a new way to view and lead large-scale change. The US Navy Center for Executive Education utilizes Appreciative Inquiry to quickly get to decision points with input from all stakeholders. Their website describes this initiative and has many resources and links to Appreciative Inquiry and how it is being utilized in the Navy. 4
President Tom White of GTE Telecommunications had this to say about Appreciative Inquiry: AI gets much better results than seeking out and solving problems. We concentrate enormous resources on correcting problems…[but] when used continually over a long time, this approach leads to a negative culture…[or to] a slip into a paralyzing sense of hopelessness …Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating mindless happy talk. AI is a complex science designed to make things better. We can’t ignore problems--we just need to approach them from the other side.
What does your team do effectively and how can you build on it?
Learn how to enhance your team’s performance by igniting engaging conversations, say Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Bloom , Jay Cherney, and Ron Fry to discover the keys to past successes and future possibilities. Their book, Appreciative Team Building: Positive Questions to Bring Out the Best of Your Team provides 48 positive questions, sample interview guides, and a step-by-step process for using appreciative inquiry to build a high performance team.5
The 5 Dysfunctions of Teams: what gets in the way of accountability and results
In this popular corporate fable, Patrick Lencioni identified why teams don’t work, how to recognize dysfunction and what to do about it. Teams work, he says, when they have: Effective transparency, open conversation, and collaboration. Teams fail when there is an absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. And team leaders need to learn how to recognize the symptoms of dysfunction and intervene.
One good indicator of team dysfunction, for example, is a boring team meeting, says Lencioni. When people don’t challenge one another in discussions about the business, and when people go to meetings unmotivated, you can be pretty confident that they’re not collectively engaged.6
In a high-functioning team, people enjoy their work; obstacles become challenges that are fun to take on, rather than annoyances to be endured between arrival at work and 5pm.
Do people reserve their complaints for hallway conversations instead of voicing them during meetings? If so, that’s a sign of both a lack of trust and absence healthy conflict.7
And what about individuals who are not following through? Lencioni’s first piece of advice to a manager is: tell the team member he is underperforming. So many times people are not aware of their situation because managers shy away from giving them direct feedback, especially if it’s negative.
The Role of Team Leader is vital, according to Wisdom of Teams.8 The leader’s job is to:
- Keep the team’s purpose, goals and approach meaningful.
- Build commitment and confidence among the group.
- Strengthen the mix and level of skills by assessing and choosing members carefully, then bringing in balancing talents when they are needed.
- Manage external relationships and remove obstacles so the team can quickly create successes.
- Create opportunities for others on the team to develop and grow their expertise and influence.
- Do real work. Teamwork is quickly destroyed when work that is creative and well-conceived vaporizes in the black hole of corporate inaction. The effect is to erect a high hurdle of distrust and cynicism for future team participation.
Celebration
Recognition doesn’t have to be expensive. Genuine praise from a peer or a manager can be very gratifying to an individual who is trying on new ideas or behaviors. The organization needs to develop the habit of recognizing the team rather than the team leader. Performance standards, says team expert and author Peter Lencioni, have to reward team performance more than individual performance.9
Success does not result from motivation, we are told by Shinichi Suzuki, the famed inventor of the worldwide phenomenon of Suzuki music training, motivation is the result of success. You can transform your team through attention to defining a purpose and goals through careful inquiry into what is working; demanding accountability that requires high performance involvement by all the members ; doing real work that achieves results; and recognizing and celebrating success when it is achieved. While it takes commitment, patience and insight to get there, high performance teams become self-motivating because receiving the support of peers to perform at your best is so satisfying that it makes work highly desirable.
- Wisdom of Teams, by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, 2001
- From Management Consulting News Interview - Meet the MasterMinds: Patrick Lencioni Shows How to Conquer the Dysfunctions of a Team. Patrick Lencioni is a consultant, bestselling author, and president of The Table Group, a consulting firm that specializes in executive team development and organizational health.
- Meet the Freight Fairy; Teamsters and Managers Work Together Author: Joanne Gordon Forbes Magazine
Date: 01/20/2003 Volume: 171 - www.cee.nps.navy.mil/NewSite/leadership_summit.htm
The Leadership Summit: Bold and Enlightened Naval Leaders at Every Level Forging an Empowered Culture of Excellence. A website describing a bold leadership initiative. - iUniverse 01/01/2004 ISBN: 0595335039
- From Management Consulting News Interview - Meet the MasterMinds: Patrick Lencioni Shows How to Conquer the Dysfunctions of a Team.
- ibid
- Wisdom of Teams, by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, 2001
- From Management Consulting News Interview - Meet the MasterMinds: Patrick Lencioni Shows How to Conquer the Dysfunctions of a Team.
