Chapter 8 LC Building and Leading High-Performing Summary

Building an effective team raises organizational and individual leadership issues. In deciding to use teams across your company, you will want to look closely at the company culture and compensation structure to see if they both support teamwork.

Deciding to form a team is a process very similar to deciding to call a meeting. Both meetings and teams can alienate participants if they are not clearly the best approach.
High-performing individuals working together in a team with a clear objective and the commitment to achieve it can be very effective team despite the environment. Having a supportive environment will simply make your role in leading and managing teams easier.

Once you have decided that a team is the best answer, you will need to look closely at how you will form that team. Companies often decide who should be on teams based on functional responsibilities, for instance. If you have the freedom to select the members, however, you will find Katzenbach and Smith’s team basics framework, the apex topics—performance results, personal growth, and collective work products—represent the outcome of the work of the team.

The other items are the characteristics of what Katzenbach and Smith consider a “real” team:
Complementary skills (problem solving, technical/functional, interpersonal)
Accountability (mutual, individual, and small number of people)
Commitment (specific goals, common approach, meaningful purpose)

Once you have told the selected team members that they are on your team, you should schedule a launch or kick-off meeting. Teams tend to begin their work more effectively if you take the time to hold an official launch. Having a launch, allows you to address many of the team work process steps. Although most teams will probably want to jump right into the work without spending the necessary time on process issues, leading them through development of the purpose, goals, and approach (the commitment side of the team basics framework) will help your team work more efficiently and effectively. The primary causes of conflict in a team are poorly defined goals and purposes and lack of clarity about the approach to the work and problem solving.

One of the first steps for your team will be to create a team charter or contract. A charter usually consists of the following:

Project purpose/goals.
Team member roles and responsibilities.
Ground rules.
Communication protocol.

For a team project of any complexity or length, an action plan of overall phases is useful and a specific work plan of all action items and end products with responsibilities and time lines is essential. Although any plan has to be updated frequently as the project unfolds, creating one at the beginning of the project is necessary for all team members to know exactly what needs to be done, by whom, and by when. It helps avoid duplication of effort, ensures all needed activities are included, and allocates adequate time for the planned actions.

A team’s performance will depend on the team being able to deliver the results of its work. That usually means delivering a presentation, a report, or both. These tasks are often one of the major communication challenges that teams face.

You will want to include all tasks to create and complete your document or presentation in the action steps of your work plan. Teams typically underestimate the time it will take to create and complete a document or presentation as a team. They make this mistake because they do not push far enough into the details of document or presentation creation and completion.

Listing all the steps will ensure the team allows enough time for the creation and completion of their document or presentation. You want to plan for this work just as you do for the research and analysis. Otherwise, you risk not allowing enough time, and the resulting rush may prevent you from delivering the high-quality end product that is characteristic of a high-performing team.

Team members want to learn from the experiences of being on the team, which calls for reflecting on the team work process. Teams working together over an extended period of time should build in periodic process checks. Doing so allows them to determine which processes are working well and which may need to be changed. They should revisit their roles and responsibilities, ground rules, and communication protocol. The team leader will also want to provide feedback on the performance of individual members and ask for feedback on his or her performance as a team leader.

Although team members will get to know each other through day-to-day interactions while working together, the team members can shorten the learning curve by discussing the following information at the first team meeting:
Position and responsibilities
Team experiences
Expectations
Personality
Cultural differences

Despite all of the best planning and time spent getting to know each other, teams will likely experience conflict. Some of it will be useful and some not, but the odds are that it will occur.

Internal team conflict will usually be one of the four types:
Analytical (team’s constructive disagreement over a project issue or problem).
Task (goal, work process, deliverables).
Interpersonal (personality, diversity, communication styles).
Roles (leadership, responsibilities, power struggles).

Most teams will use one of the following three approaches to managing conflict:
One on one: Individuals involved work it out between themselves.
Facilitation: Individuals involved work with a facilitator (mediator)
Team: Individuals involved discussed it with the entire team

More and more companies are using virtual teams to connect their personnel in offices around the globe. In fact, research has shown that today “most teamwork is virtual” with it being rare “to find all team members located in one place” in organizations.

Virtual teams are teams whose members are geographically dispersed and rely primarily on technology (telephone, computer, video, or some combination) for communication and to accomplish their work as a team.

Virtual teams provide several advantages for companies today: lowering travel and facility costs, reducing project schedules, allowing the leveraging of expertise and vertical integration, improving efficiency, and positioning to compete globally.
On the other hand, virtual teams also provide challenges, particularly in communications:
Lost in context of communication
Cultural differences
Difficulties in sharing and discussing complex information
Connection and trust difficult to build in a virtual environment

A virtual team needs to have even more structure than a traditional team and must spend even more time on basic good team practices, such as having a clear purpose and objectives, establishing ground rules, creating work plans, and developing team communication protocols.

According to an article in The McKinsey Quaterly, a virtual team needs the following to be successful: (1) shared beliefs, (2) a “storehouse of credibility and trust,” and (3) a shared work space.

The shared beliefs come from the team discussing fundamental questions about how they plan to approach the problems, examining areas of potential conflict, and taking time to resolve any differences. To build a storehouse of credibility and trust, each team member needs to “pay careful attention to the way others perceive them.” In addition, they need to “deliver on their promises, and do so on time; consider other people’s schedules; deal straightforwardly with colleagues; and respond promptly to emails and voicemails.” Creating a work space means that they need to establish a virtual team room through the technology available to them. It should allow them to communicate easily and to share in developing ideas and documents.