Getting The Most Out of Teams

Introduction

This book debunks and challenges many commonly held views and popular myths about leadership and teams. So when swimming against the current viewpoint it seems appropriate to take a moment and establish who this book is directed towards, to define what is meant by a team and what teams are thus covered, to define what is meant by leadership and what leadership is covered, and to hear from a few who have already used this material to get a glimpse of that experience.

Audience

Who can make use of and benefit from the material covered in this book? Virtually everyone I think. For starters anyone who is either an employee or employer. Additionally folks who find themselves organizing groups of people, including children.

Most important the people who can make use of this material are, pardon my expression, ordinary. It does not take someone with a college degree or someone as trained as an Olympic athlete. All of us are candidates to benefit both as team members as well in our roles as leaders.

Some might think they only work by themselves and therefore never have the opportunity to work on a team. But unless you are a hermit hiding in the back woods, all of us interact with many people who provide us service. In these interactions we can choose to operate as cooperative peers who both have something to give and to gain, i.e. a small team. Too in these interactions we are the initiators who know what they want from the interaction, i.e. a leader.

Teams

It is commonplace to find ourselves operating in various teams. Work asks for us to "get on board and be a team member". At church we find ourselves on a ruling board. In our volunteer activities we are assigned to a committee. In many situations we are challenged be an effective individual but do that while interacting with others in this grouping called a team. But experience with these teams varies.

Some experience with teams has been unsatisfactory. Some people avoid teams and see them as time consuming, dragging down good people’s performance. One classic business negative stereotype is the business meeting that goes on at length and results in no obvious useful output. The Dilbert comic strip entertains many with these kinds of examples. It is obvious that creating useful and efficient teams is not all that easy. Many might seek the help of what has been already written.

Much work has been published on the subject of teams, team development, managing teams and team leadership. It would appear that this is a tired subject. Unfortunately everything so far has approached teams from outside the team, from a manager’s viewpoint and not that of the team member. The approach so far seems to make the assumption that someone outside the team can maximize the team and make the team do what it was assembled for. This viewpoint might be valid where the people managed are not the intellectual and emotional peers of the manager but that is generally not the case in the American society. Thus a different mindset needs to be taken.

Our approach here is to get inside the team and explore what a team member does that is most helpful and which contributes to optimal team performance. Clearly it is the team members’ behavior and how it interacts with other team members that constitutes the results of the team. Thus, we focus on the individual team member’s contribution exploring what is needed to optimize various behaviors and interactions with the expectation that results too will be maximized. However this too is not sufficient since teams do not operate in a vacuum.

Influences from outside the team are important and are separately investigated. This material can give managers and leaders guidance about how their behavior can maximize the results of the team.

The reason that all this material has been collected is that in combination -- a high performing team with a highly effective manager – the organizational results far exceed any other approach described heretofore. The combination also maximizes satisfaction of the team members and maximizes the results of the team while establishing realistic confidence so that the results are repeatable and sustainable. This is a pretty good deal. Even better this book shows how to objectively measure all of this and pinpoints where to place effort to improve.

Generalities are great but is my unique team covered here?

Most likely your team is covered since any group of people that works together to achieve common objectives is a team. A team is just a collection of team members. There is an enormous diversity among teams considering skills, types of interaction and the duration of the assemblage of the team. In some teams, the members have unique skills. In other teams, the members have largely similar and interchangeable skills. In some teams, the members interact in a highly structured and rigid fashion. In other teams, the members interact in an unpredictable and dynamic fashion. Teams may be assembled for short periods of time. Other teams may be together for years. It is possible to describe at least three general kinds of teams: Partnership, Competitive and Non-competitive.

Sample Team Models

There are many team models that benefit from optimizing team member behaviors. All of these models are covered in this book. For a moment consider these specific types to be our target:

Partnership Model
In a partnership, all members have equal power, authority and responsibility, e.g. a marriage, a child’s play group, a business partnership.

Competitive Model
In a competitive team, one group is pitted against another with some notion of winning and losing, e.g. sports like baseball, football and basketball, armies, American business and international governments.

Non-competitive Model
The non-competitive team usually provides a service, e.g. federal, state and local governments, the United Way, the Red Cross and international trade organizations like the World Trade Organization.

Leadership

Why is the subject of leadership brought up in a text about getting the most out of teams? Don’t the highest performing teams outgrow management?

High performing teams do outgrow their need for traditional management but they never outgrow their need for leadership. Leadership provides a statement of direction and vision of what should be possible at the end of the current rainbow. Teams need this guidance. More to the point, teams thrive on such guidance.

Unfortunately organizational literature and business school curriculum cover a great deal on management but far less on leadership. And most of what is covered does so in isolation and not with regard the impact on the teams involved.

Clearly much