What Is an Effective Team?
Teams in a Changing World
According to Jon. R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, authors of the Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization, a team is a "small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable".
Of course, this describes an ideal team. A real team might be quite different. You have probably suffered the pain of working on a team lacking in complementary skills, with no clear common purpose, and plagued by uncommitted members who refuse to hold themselves accountable. However, as a project manager, you need to work with the team you have, not with the team you wish you had, leading your group through the uncertainty inherent in a living order project, and encouraging collaboration at every turn.
Attributes of a good team leader:
Most important tool: ears.
Most important skills: active listening and reflection (Nelson).
The most powerful sources of uncertainty in any project are the people charged with carrying it out. What's more, because a project is, by definition, a temporary endeavor, the team that completes it is usually temporary as well, and often must come together very quickly. These facts can exacerbate leadership challenges that are not an issue in more stable situations. Some organizations maintain standing teams that tackle a variety of projects as they arise. But even in those cases, individual team members come and go. These minor changes in personnel can hugely affect the team's overall cohesion and effectiveness.
How can you make your team as effective as possible? For starters, it helps to feel good about being on a team in the first place. According to Katzenbach and Smith, most people either undervalue the power of teams or actually dislike them. They point to three sources for this skepticism about teams: "a lack of conviction that a team or teams can work better than other alternatives; personal styles, capabilities, and preferences that make teams risky or uncomfortable; and weak organizational performance ethics that discourage the conditions in which teams flourish" (1993, 14). But research shows that highly functioning teams are far more than the sum of their individual members:
First, they bring together complementary skills and experiences that, by definition, exceed those of any individual on the team. This broader mix of skills and know-how enables teams to respond to multifaceted challenges like innovation, quality, and customer service. Second, in jointly developing clear goals and approaches, teams establish communications that support real-time problem solving and initiative. Teams are flexible and responsive to changing event and demands…. Third, teams provide a unique social dimension that enhances the economic and administrative aspects of work…. Both the meaning of work and the effort brought to bear upon it deepen, until team performance eventually becomes its own reward. Finally, teams have more fun. This is not a trivial point because the kind of fun they have is integral to their performance.
Viewed through the lens of living order, perhaps the most important thing about teams is the way they, by their very nature, encourage members to adapt to changing circumstances:
Because of their collective commitment, teams are not as threatened by change as are individuals left to fend for themselves. And, because of their flexibility and willingness to enlarge their solution space, teams offer people more room for growth and change than do groups with more narrowly defined task assignments associated with hierarchical job assignments.
A Word on Risk
Joining a team - that is, fully committing yourself to a group of people with a shared goal - is always a risk. But risk can bring rewards for those willing to take a chance. Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, explain that, in their studies of scores of teams, they discovered
an underlying pattern: real teams do not emerge unless the individuals on them take risks involving conflict, trust, interdependence, and hard work. Of the risks required, the most formidable involve building the trust and interdependence necessary to move from individual accountability to mutual accountability. People on real teams must trust and depend on one another - not totally or forever - but certainly with respect to the team's purpose, performance goals, and approach. For most of us such trust and interdependence do not come easily; it must be earned and demonstrated repeatedly if it is to change behavior.