The word "team" gets bandied about so loosely that many managers are oblivious to its real meaning--or its true potential.
With a run-of-the-mill working group, performance is a function of what the members do as individuals. A team's performance, by contrast, calls for both individual and mutual accountability.
Though it may not seem like anything special, mutual accountability can lead to astonishing results. It enables a team to achieve performance levels that are far greater than the individual bests of the team's members. To achieve these benefits, team members must do more than listen, respond constructively, and provide support to one another. In addition to sharing these team-building values, they must share an essential discipline.
"A team is only as strong as its weakest link." - Mark Grey
Our View
The Idea at Work...Here are 5 key characteristics to a team's essential disipline comprises:
1. A meaningful common purpose that the team has helped shape (understand the team's history and develop trust inside).
Most teams are responding to an initial mandate from outside the team. But to be successful, the team must "own" this purpose; develop its own spin on it.
2. Specific performance goals that flow from the common purpose (understand the buy-in process to goal setting and have an execution plan).
For example, getting a new product to market in less than half the normal time. Compelling goals inspire and challenge a team, give it a sense of urgency. They also have a leveling effect, requiring members to focus on the collective effort necessary rather than any differences in title or status.
3. A mix of complementary skills (understand the team's capabilities and cultivate new habits).
These include technical or functional expertise, problem-solving and decision-making skills, and interpersonal skills. Successful teams rarely have all the needed skills at the outset--they develop them as they learn what the challenge requires.
4. A strong commitment to how the work gets done (understand the immovable pressures and remove barriers).
Teams must agree on who will do what jobs, how schedules will be established and honored, and how decisions will be made and modified. On a genuine team, each member does equivalent amounts of real work; all members, the leader included, contribute in concrete ways to the team's collective work-products.
5. Mutual accountability (undertsand the strength and weaknesses, focus on developing a culture of results and relationships).
Trust and commitment cannot be coerced. The process of agreeing upon appropriate goals serves as the crucible in which members forge their accountability to each other--not just to the leader.
Once the essential discipline has been established, a team is free to concentrate on the critical challenges it faces:
For a team whose purpose is to make recommendations, that means making a fast and constructive start and providing a clean handoff to those who will implement the recommendations.
For a team that makes or does things, it's keeping the specific performance goals in sharp focus.
For a team that runs things, the primary task is distinguishing the challenges that require a real team approach from those that don't.
If a task doesn't demand joint work-products, a working group can be the more effective option. Team opportunities are usually those in which hierarchy or organisational boundaries inhibit the skills and perspectives needed for optimal results. Little wonder, then, that teams have become the primary units of productivity in high-performance organizations.
This excerpt is adapted from the HBR OnPoint article, "The Discipline of Teams.
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By George K Sawiris AFAMI
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