It is a near impossibility for members to learn how to interact well within a flawed or underspecified team structure.
It is well established that people do not learn well when they brim with anxieties, including those that have to do with getting a piece of work finished on time and well.
Once a team has been formed and given its task, managers sometimes assume their work is done. A strict hands-off stance, however, can limit a team’s effectiveness when members are not already skilled and experienced in teamwork—a not uncommon state of affairs in cultures where individualism is a dominant value.
In the locker room before the game, coaches tend to focus on matters of motivation, establishing that the contest about to begin will be quite challenging but that the team has a real chance to win if members play hard and well. Halftime, back in the locker room, is a time for consultation, revising the game strategy for the second half of play based on how things have gone thus far. The next day, when the team has gathered to review the game films, is the time when coaches focus on education, helping to build individual and team proficiency in preparation for the team’s next contest.
No matter how well-designed, well-timed, and well-executed coaching interventions are, they are unlikely to be of much help if a team’s overall performance situation is poor. If members are unclear about what they are supposed to accomplish, if the team or its task are badly designed, or if the surrounding organization places obstacle after obstacle in the team’s path, then a leader would be well advised to focus first on solving these more fundamental problems.
Indeed, it may be that fundamental change can be accomplished in an established organization only when it has become destabilized for some other reason—for example, the departure of a senior manager, the rapid growth or dissolution of an organizational unit, financial disaster, or the introduction of a new technology that requires abandonment of standard ways of operating.
For all the attention being given to top management teams these days, my reading of the management literature is that successful organizations almost always are led by a single, talented and courageous human being.
Managers sometimes attempt to capture the benefits of teamwork by simply declaring that some set of people (often everyone who reports to the same supervisor) is now a team and that members should henceforth behave accordingly. Real teams cannot be created that way.
The exercise of authority creates anxiety, especially when one must balance between assigning a team authority for some parts of the work and withholding it for other parts. Because both managers and team members tend to be uncomfortable in such situations, they may implicitly collude to “clarify” who is really in charge of the work. Sometimes the result is the assignment of virtually all authority to the team—which can result in anarchy or in a team heading off in an inappropriate direction. Other times, managers retain all authority for themselves, dictating work procedures in detail to team members and, in the process, losing many of the advantages that can accrue from team work.
Our research suggests that team effectiveness is enhanced when managers are unapologetic and insistent about exercising their own legitimate authority about direction, the end states the team is to pursue. Authority about the means by which those ends are accomplished, however, should rest squarely with the team itself.
Having clear direction helps align team efforts with the objectives of the parent organization, provides members with a criterion to use in choosing among various means for pursuing those objectives, and fosters the motivational engagement of team members. When direction is absent or unclear, members may wallow in uncertainty about what they should be doing and may even have difficulty generating the motivation to do much of anything.
Effective coaching interventions address issues that are naturally alive for the group at the particular time when they are made. Those that ask members to consider matters that are not salient for them at the time may do little other than distract the team from getting on with its work.
Countering institutional forces is not management as usual. Nor do such forces yield gracefully to planned organizational change programs of the flip chart and to-do list variety.
The conditions that foster team effectiveness are simple and seemingly straightforward to put in place. A real team with work that lends itself to teamwork. A clear and engaging direction. A group structure—task, composition, and norms—that promotes competent teamwork. Team-friendly reward, educational, and information systems. And some coaching to help team members take advantage of their favorable performance circumstances. Yet to install these simple conditions is also to determine the answers to four fundamental questions about how an enterprise operates: 1. Who decides? Who has the right to make decisions about how the work will be carried out, and to determine how problems that develop will be resolved? 2. Who is responsible? Where do responsibility and accountability for performance outcomes ultimately reside? 3. Who gains? How are monetary rewards allocated among the individuals and groups that helped generate them? 4. Who learns? How are opportunities for learning, growth, and career advancement distributed among organization members? The answers to these four questions express some of the core values of any enterprise, and it can be maddeningly hard to change them. For one thing, to change the answers to the four questions is almost certain to threaten the turf and personal interests of currently powerful organizational actors. These individuals are therefore likely to find lots of good reasons why it would be ill-advised or excessively risky to alter standard ways of operating. Moreover, the answers to the four questions are, in established organizations, supported by deeply rooted institutional structures...
People get hurt in revolutions. Especially those who lead them. Even when they are successful.
Because creating and supporting work teams in organizations often requires the redirection of strong institutional forces, the activity is more appropriately viewed as revolutionary than as management-as-usual.
The most engaging and powerful statements of corporate vision, by contrast, invariably are the product of a single intelligence, set forth by a leader willing to take the risk of establishing collective purposes that lie just beyond what others believe to be the limits of the organization’s capability.
Teams, then, are somewhat akin to audio amplifiers: Whatever passes through the device—be it signal or noise—comes out louder.
It is a near impossibility for members to learn how to interact well within a flawed or underspecified team structure.