Part 3 - The What and Why of great teams
This post is based on a course lesson from How to incrementally improve your Team.
Description of most teams
The use of teams has become commonplace driven by the need to be more competitive and driven by changes in business technology. Current team organisational structures have limitations, they tend to be silo-based, hierarchical, facilitate only existing skill sets, are almost exclusively project-driven and suffer from the lack of or poorly integrated processes. They are unable to rapidly respond to changing business technologies and the need to be more competitive. They do not employ modern management styles, behaviours or techniques. They are largely incapable of genuine innovation due to their inability to constructively harness conflict and advanced communication techniques. They have poor creativity capacity and primarily just reinvent. Their individual productivity and contribution to corporate growth are difficult to measure.
Description of a good team
Great teams do not suffer from these limitations and it is not an overstatement to say that a team-high on the Team Maturity Scale has no limitations. Here are four, quite different, but accurate descriptions of a great team:
1. My own description is a team that has a structure and mode of operation based on the ‘Management and Teams’ ™ management model. The team has specific characteristics that define the way the team thinks, operates and produces.
2. A great description of a great team comes from the excellent work by Katzenbach, J. R. and Smith, D.K. (1993), The Wisdom of Teams. They state: “A great team is a small group of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which they are mutually accountable.”
3. Scott Keller and Mary Meaney in ‘Leading Organisations: Ten Timeless Truths’ over a decade asked more than 5000 executives to think about their “peak experience” and to write down the words that described that environment. The results are remarkably consistent with descriptions of mature teams and reveal three key dimensions of great teamwork.
1. The first is alignment in direction, where there is a shared belief about what the company is striving toward and the role of the team in getting there.
2. The second is high-quality interaction, characterised by trust, open communication, and a willingness to embrace conflict.
3. The third is a strong sense of renewal, meaning an environment in which team members are energised.
4. Prachi Juneja of Dun & Bradstreet states that.
1. Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.
2. Members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.
3. Members connect directly with one another—not just with the team leader.
The reasons, the characteristics, the what and the why, that makes for a great team
1. Team members are a tight-knit cohesive unit because they believe in and share a common goal.
2. Team members understand their individual contributions because their performance goals are aligned with the common goal.
3. Team members selflessly support and motivate each other because they know that at some time, they all need help, and this is how the whole team wins.
4. Team members are mutually accountable to each other because they have agreed to share each other’s failures and successes.
5. Team members have significantly higher job satisfaction levels because they achieve more than ordinary teams and because they get great enjoyment from knowing they are different.
6. Team members do not have confused accountabilities, position description conflicts or overlaps because they have a clear definition of who owns what, who decides what and who is both responsible and accountable for what.
7. Team members handle significantly less email traffic because their roles and responsibilities definitions mean all information is shared on a need to know basis only.
8. Team members are motivated to do their best because they individually establish a set of measurable, personal and professional goals.
9. Team members evaluate themselves and their staff because it provides new insights into individual management needs, strengths, weaknesses and mutual opportunities for growth.
10. Team members assess where they are on the Team Maturity Scale because it reveals the gap to either reach higher levels of maturity.
11. Team members analyse their current management style because it allows them to create new management styles that focus on professionalism, management and people leadership qualities.
12. Team members create a personal definition of professionalism for themselves because this then establishes and baselines their professional standing.
13. Team members have a specific way of conducting meetings because it keeps them focussed on what really matters, enhances their management effectiveness and creates meetings that have real value.
14. Team members accept being mentored and mentoring of others because it builds relationships, improves the management of others, and creates the first stage of open and honest communication and because it helps to develop themselves and their staff to their fullest potential.
15. Team members define individual roles and responsibilities because knowing how they support the team, and how they contribute to the success and results of the team produces greater job satisfaction and commitment, less work and fewer mistakes.
16. Team members provide motivation and support because it makes them feel closer to those whom they are helping, it builds trust and inspires others to achieve higher levels of performance.
17. Team members selflessly collaborate because it helps all team members achieve each other’s goals and the common goal.
18. Team members understand and practice interpersonal skills because they are the foundations of trust, open communication, conflict management and respect.
19. Team members create a set of team rules because this gives the team its cultural baseline.
20. Team members do have bad feelings or unfettered conflict because they know how to manage and harness conflict in order to promote creativity and innovation and bond more closely.
As a team takes onboard more of these characteristics, they progress upwards on the Team Maturity Scale. (with each step on the scale having specific characteristics). A team can move from good to great or better and can elect to stop at any point on the scale or progress to the top reaching High-Performance.
It is a surprisingly quick and easy process to imbue these characteristics into a team and in so doing, either turn a team around or take it up a step.