Tag Archives: Leadership
Great Teams are High-Performance
Teamwork
Good teams will be well-functioning, but great teams will be high-performance. We have already looked at the ten characteristics of the well-functioning team which included purpose, priorities, roles, decisions, conflict, personal traits, norms, effectiveness, success and training.
Please keep in mind the idea that a team is a group organized to work together to accomplish a set of objectives that cannot be achieved effectively by individuals.
What are the traits of the high-performance team? You might want to compare this set of characteristics of a superior team to one that is well-functioning.
In a high-performance team you will find:
Participative leadership–Being a participative leader means involving team members in making decisions. This is most essential when creative thinking is needed to solve complex problems. If the leader is an acting participant of the team, the team feels interdependent, empowered and freed up to serve each other. When the leader has the team participate in developing answers to problems with the project, the team begins to own the project and to protect it and each other as co-owners.
Shared responsibility— In a shared-responsibility team, That Leader no longer has the sole responsibility for the success of the project or for individual team member performance. That Leader’s new role is to develop the talents, skills, and mindset of all team members so they can participate, contribute, and share in the management and leadership of the team. The team members are empowered and feel comfortable holding one another accountable to the business’s goals. They do not do this using criticism, blame or going behind one another’s backs. Instead they listen to each other’s ideas, express themselves tactfully and praise each other’s good ideas.
Aligned on purpose—The team has a sense of common purpose about why the team exists and its functions. The Purpose is a moral conviction: a rationale that explains why a particular group of talented people—leader and team–should spend their valuable time working together in this group doing these particular things. They have a clean sense of what they are trying to produce, what the performance goals are, the value of a team that works well together, and a sense of interdependence.
High communication—High communication helps the team work in a climate of trust and open, honest communication. Some of the basic patterns for communications behavior are that the leader is clear in what is the important thing to discuss, whether the subjects under discussion support the main issue, are the members connecting with the message, is the communication clear and could this be explained with fewer words and less talk.
Future focused—The team is seeking change as an opportunity for growth, professional, personal and for the business.
Focused on task—The team will work together to see that meetings and interactions are focused on results concerning the project, not on each other or other topics.
Creative talents—All members come to the team with individual talents and creativity which all are encouraged to use on the project. But how does the team discover each person’s talents? Is this person more into people, projects, products or problem solving? To get the best out of a person, it is important to understand what he or she enjoys doing most.
Rapid Response—Not just a medical concept, rapid response refers to the team identifying and acting on opportunities quickly. If a project is not going to work as decided, the team must be able to respond to the problem and come up with some alternate solutions.
Do you see these traits as important parts of a high-performance team? Have you worked in one this these characteristics?
This information is from Washington State School Directors’ Association and found on http://www.nsba.org/sbot/toolkit/.
Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing, helps business owners and business professionals put marketing strategies in place that consistently secure new clients. He can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.799.1238. You can “Like” him at www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing or connect with him on www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.
Related articles
- Teamwork Pt. 1 (sellinginnovation.wordpress.com)
- Top 10 Management on Teamwork: An Overview and Analysis of Why There is No I in Team (socyberty.com)
What Are the Characteristics of Well-functioning Teams?
Team members at work
The purpose for teams is to combine a group of members to work together to accomplish certain goals that cannot be achieved effectively by an individual. Do you wonder why I keep repeating this? It’s because sometimes teams can get off-track like an elementary school student who starts reading an encyclopedia entry for a class and ends up following a cow path far from the subject because he loses focus.
Characteristics of a Team
Sense of unity
Having spent a lot of time talking about That Leader we are now going to turn to the characteristics of teams.
Regardless of the size of the team there are certain characteristics of a team for it to meet the criteria for being a team at all. Any group of people that gets together for a meeting is an example of a group of people together who may not be members of a common team.
Leadership Teams
Team work
A team is a group organized to work together to accomplish a set of objectives that cannot be achieved effectively by individuals. That Leader knows that a key to successful planning and implementation of any goal is the development of teams. He also decides which type of team he needs of the three types we are going to look at.
Conflict and Collaboration
Collaboration
Conflict occurs when a team member or even the entire team are not getting what they need or want and seek their own self-interest. Often the individual is not aware that he has a need and acts out unconsciously. Other times, however the individual is very aware of his wants and actively works at achieving the goal.
After the team leader has seen the beginnings of the conflict through looking at conflict indicators and has determined if the conflict is destructive or the leader can turn it around into a constructive conflict and has done what he can to resolve the conflict, That Leader might propose a new way of reaching consensus—that of collaboration.
How That Leader Avoids or Resolves Conflict
Team members working together
Have you ever noticed how certain team leaders have effective teams even though there are sometimes conflicts? Sometimes is probably minimizing the problem. Any time you get a group of people together there are going to be conflicts of interest, in ideas of how a project should be done or personality issues, just to name a few.
What does That Leader do to keep the team focused on the project and not on the conflicts?
That Leader Knows When Conflict is Destructive or Constructive
Constructive Conflict Resolution
Just because conflict happens, doesn’t mean that it is always a bad thing. That Leader will know whether the conflict is destructive or is constructive.
How do you tell when a conflict is destructive?
That Leader will know that a conflict is destructive when the team is supposed to be working on goal setting and instead wind up in the middle of an argument that takes attention away from the purpose of the meeting. If someone is having a problem and decides that the meeting is the place to air it, That Leader needs to take control of the meeting back, offer to meet with the argumentative person later and return to the topic.
How That Leader Deals With Conflict
Team Conflict
Conflict happens.
It happens when individuals or groups are not getting what they need or want and are seeking their own interests. Like a child, sometimes a person is not even aware of the need and unconsciously acts out. Then there are the people who are very aware of what they want and actively work at getting it. It is That Leader’s task to get conflict resolved as quickly as possible for the good of the team.
That Leader’s Communication Tools
Teamwork
Today we are going to look at some of things that you probably were taught at home or at school, but you may never have taken the time to look at them directly. As a result you may be at a loss when you need to communicate to your team.
How would you tell them what you want them to do without sounding like a nagging parent? How do you find out where they are coming from without sounding like the Inquisition? What do you say when you and the team reach an impasse?
How Are You Doing in Becoming That Leader?
Simple Strategic Plan
Here is a leadership self-assessment to help you see where you are and what you need to work on. Please take some time to think about yourself as That Leader. Let’s start with a list of the tasks of leadership for you to think about.
