It seems to me that managers and leaders often take for granted that people in organisations should operate within teams. Undoubtedly, given the right conditions, teams can be powerful and perform highly. Teams enable people with a diversity of knowledge, skill, experience and networks to come together and produce outcomes that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible. Effective teams also increase job satisfaction, commitment to the organisation, group cohesion and reduce employees intent to quit. In an increasingly small world where we compete not just locally but internationally, capitalising on diversity in the workforce can be the difference between spectacular success and spectacular failure. Teams can be very powerful indeed.
However, teams can also underperform and often do. Some of the reasons are well known: Social loafing, poor interactions, poor communication etc. Such things lead to process losses, but equally, teams can make process gains in the right conditions.
Team behaviour can hide unethical and immoral behaviour that is detrimental to the organisation. Groupthink can take over and as a result the benefits of working in a team are lost. If ‘teams’ don’t work effectively, and work effectively in the right conditions, the consequences can be hard hitting and have a wide impact. For example, the disasters that befell the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger might never have happened. The recent banking crisis might have been averted. The list is long!
The onus lies on the manager or leader to decide whether they need a team or whether people would perform better working as individuals. How many managers and leaders take the time to consider this? If the answer is that a team is to be formed, a second question arises. This question is ‘under what conditions will the team perform the best?’. I find this question intriguing and it has occupied me for some time. Fortunately, thanks to many years of hard work by a select group of academics and consultants there are some insights into this. Through integrating their ideas, I have designed a working model that enables team work that results in high performance. However, before this, it is probably best to answer the first question: Do we need a team?
Do we need a team?
The late Professor J. Richard Hackman provided some insight. In his view, teams should only be used when a reason could be explicitly named. For example:
a. Because the resources of more than one person were required.
b. Because diverse skills and perspectives are required to accomplish the work.
c. Because flexibility is needed to keep pace with a rapidly changing context.
d. Because you want to provide a setting in which individuals can refine their capabilities through interacting with others.
However, Professor Hackman had a number of team models in mind when he considered these reasons. The first reason appears to be aligned with a co-acting group; multiple people performing the same role. Co-acting groups tend to perform less highly than real teams where team members are interdependent. If we want teams that perform highly, we are left with the last three reasons: Requirement for diverse skills and perspectives; rapidly changing context; promoting learning. The latter, promoting learning, is essential to success (see, for example, work by Professor Amy Edmondson, Whitney Johnson and Professor J. Richard Hackman). To these we might add that there is a requirement for creativity and strong decision making; both of these are improved through appropriate use of teams. However, if the manager / leader can not cite one of the above as a reason for forming a team, then a team might not be required. Or, consideration should be given to reframing and redesigning work so as capitalise on the use of teams.
We want a team. What’s next?
What comes next is a challenge. The challenge is to develop conditions within which the team will flourish. This is not a small challenge because the choice has been made to add layers of complexity to the leadership of individuals. It is no longer sufficient to encourage followership, enable individual learning, clarify lines of sight and provide guidance (amongst all of the other things that leadership of individuals entails). The influence of one person on another and interactions of individuals must now be considered so as to make them work for the team rather than against it. Key questions might include:
a. Who do we need on the team (if we have a choice)?
b. What are their strengths and what roles will they fill?
c. How do we minimise the impact of egos and reputations and ensure interdependence?
d. How will the different personalities influence each other, and will it be constructive?
e. How can we ensure open and honest communication?
f. How can we ensure that the team learns?
g. How will we encourage members to forgo their own selfish needs in favour of the teams?
h. What will success look like and how will we reward this?
A further consideration would be how long the team will exist for. Some teams are highly fluid (sand-dune teams in the terminology of Prof. Hackman), others are transient whilst others still will be long-term teams. This can affect how the team will work and how it is managed.
In my view, the primary concern should be developing an environment where high performance is expected whilst members contribute openly, honestly and responsibly. Failure to develop this environment is where team failure begins. A secondary, but important consideration, is ensuring people remain focussed and work effectively within that environment.
Fundamental to developing a conducive environment are trust, psychological safety and a focus on high performance. Failure to build these inevitably leads to team underperformance and failure.
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