Effective teams are a crucial element of high-performing organizations. We’ve had a run on consulting requests from clients that have team building or team development as a part of the work so we thought it would be helpful in this blog entry to highlight a few of the commonsense findings from one of our favorite team resources; “The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization” by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith:
- A demanding performance challenge tends to create a team. The hunger for performance is far more important to team success than team-building exercises, special incentives, or team leaders with ideal profiles. In fact, teams often form around such challenges without any help from management. Conversely, potential teams without such challenges usually fail to become teams.
- The disciplined application of “team basics” is often overlooked. Team basics include size, purpose, goals, skills, approach, and accountability. Paying rigorous attention to these is what creates the conditions necessary for team performance. A deficiency in any of these basics will derail the team, yet most potential teams inadvertently ignore one or more of them.
- Team performance opportunities exist in all parts of an organization. Team basics apply to many different groups, including teams that recommend things (i.e., task forces), teams that make or do things (i.e., production teams, sales teams), and teams that run things (i.e., management teams at various levels). Most organizations recognize team opportunities in only one or two of these categories, leaving a lot of team performance potential untapped.
- Teams at the top are the most difficult. The complexities of long-term challenges, heavy demands on executive time, and ingrained individualism of senior people conspire against teams at the top. As a result there are fewer real teams at the top of large organizations.
- Most organizations intrinsically prefer individual over group (team) accountability. Job descriptions, compensation schemes, career paths, and performance evaluations focus on individuals. Our culture emphasizes individual accomplishments and makes us uncomfortable trusting our career aspirations to outcomes depending on the performance of others. “If you want to get something done right, do it yourself” is a common belief. Even the thought of shifting emphasis from individual accountability to team accountability makes most people uneasy.
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