The team journey is not easy. There are many moments when emerging teams want to call it quits. However, if your team has been diligent, disciplined and patient, there will come a point when you realize it’s working – the team is actually accomplishing things together. What’s next?
I usually think about, talk about, study and write about teams that excel. My book, The Secret of Teams, is about creating High Performance Teams. However, I’ve been looking at this topic long enough to know – some teams stink.
How’s the performance of your team? Are there days when you wonder if you’re accomplishing anything together? One of the problems some teams have is the assumption they are a team… when they aren’t. Although the determining factors of whether a team is really a team are many, one measure is the output of the team.
As I’ve written about before, I started working diligently to understand teams and what makes them work over 20 years ago. In the mid 90’s, I read a book by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith called The Wisdom of Teams. In it, I discovered a picture to illustrate the journey we were on as an organization.
After more than three decades of studying and participating on project teams, I believe there is really a short list of reasons so many of these teams fail. Sometimes it’s a leadership issue on the team, sometimes it’s a resource question and in some situations, the team will fail because of outside factors beyond their control. But there is one reason that towers above all the others…
Most of the leaders I know would tell you that the world in which they operate is vastly more complex than it was just a few years ago. With this complexity, comes a growing challenge to execute well. At the same time, competition continues to improve thus making execution even more important than ever before. As a consequence, our future success largely hinges on our ability to execute. Today’s Challenge: How do we help our team pursue flawless execution?
Last week, I wrote about the critical role of the team leader in a high performance team. The question often emerges, “So what does the team do?” The correct answer: it depends. It depends on the purpose of the team, their composition, their competency, their level of maturity, etc. However, you can often find some common behaviors in the best teams. I’ve written more extensively about this in my book, The Secret of Teams. For today’s post, here’s my top five list.
I’ve spent the last few weeks unpacking some of the lessons we’ve learned over the last 20 years about creating high-performance teams. I couldn’t conclude this series without sharing what may be the greatest learning of all…
As the New Year approaches, many teams envision a better 2012. However, hopes and dreams require purposeful actions in order to become reality. Following are a few ideas that will help any team improve their performance in 2012.