A mix of complementary skills. A strong commitment to how the work gets done. Mutual as well as individual accountability. They also discuss several different approaches that have worked well for many high-impact teams: Establish urgency, demanding performance standards, and clear direction.
Select members for skill and skill potential, not personality. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Add this book to your favorite list ». Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Apr 16, Stephanie rated it really liked it Shelves: , april.
Apr 15, Omisile Kehinde Olugbenga rated it really liked it. Good research. Provides a whole new view to team building. Jan 08, Ivo Stoykov rated it really liked it Shelves: business , leadership , management. Nice bunch of surveys and observations of teams' problems. Answers and solutions in broad range of topics. Interesting reading. Jan 24, Anne-Marie Faiola added it.
Solid essays on leadership and team building. Not a lot of cohesion and flow because it was a bunch of different authors but definitely a good read. Geared towards larger companies. Yuval Yeret rated it liked it May 20, Tina Montosa rated it really liked it May 19, Middlethought rated it it was amazing Aug 05, Ronald C.
Johnson rated it it was amazing Nov 25, Dan rated it did not like it Jul 18, Kondwelani rated it really liked it Jun 13, Team assignments should be designed with equal care.
Not every task has to be highly creative or inspiring; many require a certain amount of drudgery. But leaders can make any task more motivating by ensuring that the team is responsible for a significant piece of work from beginning to end, that the team members have a lot of autonomy in managing that work, and that the team receives performance feedback on it.
With 4-D teams, people in different locations often handle different components of a task, which raises challenges. Consider a software design team based in Santa Clara, California, that sends chunks of code to its counterparts in Bangalore, India, to revise overnight. But in one such team we spoke with, that division of labor was demotivating, because it left the Indian team members with a poor sense of how the pieces of code fit together and with little control over what they did and how.
Repartitioning the work to give them ownership over an entire module dramatically increased their motivation and engagement and improved the quality, quantity, and efficiency of their work. Destructive dynamics can also undermine collaborative efforts. Teams can reduce the potential for dysfunction by establishing clear norms—rules that spell out a small number of things members must always do such as arrive at meetings on time and give everyone a turn to speak and a small number they must never do such as interrupt.
Instilling such norms is especially important when team members operate across different national, regional, or organizational cultures and may not share the same view of, for example, the importance of punctuality.
And in teams whose membership is fluid, explicitly reiterating norms at regular intervals is key. Having the right support is the third condition that enables team effectiveness. This includes maintaining a reward system that reinforces good performance, an information system that provides access to the data needed for the work, and an educational system that offers training, and last—but not least—securing the material resources required to do the job, such as funding and technological assistance.
While no team ever gets everything it wants, leaders can head off a lot of problems by taking the time to get the essential pieces in place from the start. Ensuring a supportive context is often difficult for teams that are geographically distributed and digitally dependent, because the resources available to members may vary a lot.
Consider the experience of Jim, who led a new product-development team at General Mills that focused on consumer goods for the Mexican market. While Jim was based in the United States, in Minnesota, some members of his team were part of a wholly owned subsidiary in Mexico.
The team struggled to meet its deadlines, which caused friction. But when Jim had the opportunity to visit his Mexican team members, he realized how poor their IT was and how strapped they were for both capital and people—particularly in comparison with the headquarters staff.
Establishing the first three enabling conditions will pave the way for team success, as Hackman and his colleagues showed. The solution to both is developing a shared mindset among team members—something team leaders can do by fostering a common identity and common understanding.
In the past teams typically consisted of a stable set of fairly homogeneous members who worked face-to-face and tended to have a similar mindset. This is a natural human response: Our brains use cognitive shortcuts to make sense of our increasingly complicated world, and one way to deal with the complexity of a 4-D team is to lump people into categories.
This was the challenge facing Alec, the manager of an engineering team at ITT tasked with providing software solutions for high-end radio communications. His team was split between Texas and New Jersey, and the two groups viewed each other with skepticism and apprehension.
Differing time zones, regional cultures, and even accents all reinforced their dissimilarities, and Alec struggled to keep all members up to speed on strategies, priorities, and roles. The situation got so bad that during a team visit to a customer, members from the two offices even opted to stay in separate hotels. In an effort to unite the team, Alec took everyone out to dinner, only to find the two groups sitting at opposite ends of the table.
Incomplete information is likewise more prevalent in 4-D teams. Very often, certain team members have important information that others do not, because they are experts in specialized areas or because members are geographically dispersed, new, or both. After all, shared knowledge is the cornerstone of effective collaboration; it gives a group a frame of reference, allows the group to interpret situations and decisions correctly, helps people understand one another better, and greatly increases efficiency.
Digital dependence often impedes information exchange, however. When we walk into an in-person meeting, for example, we can immediately sense the individual and collective moods of the people in the room—information that we use consciously or not to tailor subsequent interactions.
Having to rely on digital communication erodes the transmission of this crucial type of intelligence. Some effects of incomplete information came to light during a recent executive education session at Takeda Pharmaceuticals in Japan.
One of the U. The Americans left the office at a normal hour, had dinner with their families, and held calls in the comfort of their homes, while their Japanese colleagues stayed in the office, missed time with their families, and hoped calls ended before the last train home. Fortunately, there are many ways team leaders can actively foster a shared identity and shared understanding and break down the barriers to cooperation and information exchange.
Returning to Alec, the manager of the team whose subgroups booked separate hotels: While his dinner started with the Texas colleagues at one end of the table and the New Jersey colleagues at the other, by its close signs had emerged that the team was chipping away at its internal wall. He emphasized that both subteams contributed necessary skills and pointed out that they depended on each other for success.
To build more bridges, he brought the whole team together several more times over the next few months, creating shared experiences and common reference points and stories. You can prime teams for success by focusing on the four fundamentals. Often this is done by reserving the first 10 minutes of teamwide meetings for open discussion. The idea is to provide an opportunity for members to converse about whatever aspects of work or daily life they choose, such as office politics or family or personal events.
This helps people develop a more complete picture of distant colleagues, their work, and their environment. By simply panning the camera around the room, they were able to show their remote colleagues their work environment—including things that were likely to distract or disrupt them, such as closely seated coworkers in an open-plan space or a nearby photocopier. Together the four enabling conditions form a recipe for building an effective team from scratch. But even if you inherit an existing team, you can set the stage for its success by focusing on the four fundamentals.
How will you know if your efforts are working? We have found that these criteria apply as well as ever and advise that leaders use them to calibrate their teams over time. The ideal approach combines regular light-touch monitoring for preventive maintenance and less frequent but deeper checks when problems arise.
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