book.chapter Fundamentals of team management

To grow your business, focus on analyzing and understanding the success of your top teams. Identify their effective practices and facilitate their adoption by other teams through knowledge sharing and mentoring. This approach helps elevate overall performance, fostering an environment of excellence, creativity, and innovation. By replicating successful strategies, you set the stage for sustainable growth, ensuring that more teams leverage proven methods to achieve high levels of success and drive organizational success to new heights. Teams: Growth Engines Organizations consist of various workgroups, ranging from small teams to large units, organized by function, product, geography, or other criteria. These groups, whether permanent or temporary, are crucial for achieving measurable outcomes. In today's dynamic market environment, the traditional command-and-control management approach is losing its effectiveness. Instead, a shift towards empowering frontline workgroups to innovate and directly engage with customers is emerging as a more successful strategy. High-performing workgroups, which represent only about 10% of all teams, excel in adapting to market changes, understanding customer needs, and efficiently securing resources to meet their goals. The key drivers of their success include valuing team members, fostering critical thinking, and seizing opportunities proactively. To replicate the success of high-performing teams across an organization, leaders must recognize and apply the principles that make these teams excel. This involves moving beyond traditional productivity measures like extended working hours or headcount reductions. Sustainable productivity growth in the modern workplace is driven by creativity, innovation, and the strategic use of technology. Knowledge workers, in particular, add value not by working longer hours, but by expanding their horizons and optimizing performance through innovation and effective collaboration. By understanding and leveraging the characteristics of high-performing teams, such as clear goal setting, effective communication, mutual accountability, and a culture of recognition, organizations can enhance their overall performance and adaptability in a competitive market. Enhancing Team Environments Creating an optimal environment is crucial for developing high-performing workgroups, as it shapes their ability to thrive. Leaders should foster an environment where individuals feel valued and empowered to think critically, thereby enabling sustainable, profitable growth. The most effective approach for driving organizational growth is enhancing the performance of top workgroups. By improving the conditions in which these teams operate, organizations can organically expand their contributions. Leadership behaviors and group dynamics play a significant role in fostering a robust environment. Leaders should exhibit high self-awareness, leverage others' strengths, and avoid micromanaging. Implementing 360-degree feedback promotes accountability and focuses evaluations on observable behaviors. Providing amnesty for voicing unconventional ideas ensures psychological safety, while assuming positive intent when addressing problematic logic allows for respectful dissent. Collaborative thinking enables the group to collectively own solutions. This requires open communication, challenging assumptions to spur new ideas, recognizing smart suggestions, identifying potential risks, and developing action plans. Assigning tasks based on each member's strengths allows everyone to add unique value, harnessing the group's full potential. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Investing in skill upgrades across the group is essential to sustain high performance. When people complement each other, collaborate deeply, and feel valued for their contributions, they transform into a high-powered workgroup poised to drive organizational success. Knowledge Sharing Processes Achieving high performance in a company goes beyond just financial investment and hiring skilled personnel. It's a common misconception that setting financial goals and recruiting talent automatically leads to success. This overlooks the critical need to foster an environment conducive to high-performance work. Leaders must prioritize nurturing their teams as much as managing resources, focusing on creating a culture of excellence. This involves removing unnecessary bureaucracy, encouraging smart risk-taking, and promoting collaboration. High-performing companies understand the importance of empowering employees at all levels, ensuring decision-making autonomy, and facilitating seamless cooperation across different departments. They respect both frontline staff and customers, inverting the traditional corporate hierarchy to support those who drive real value. A shared sense of purpose unites the company, emphasizing the need for a supportive environment that encourages innovation and cooperation. This approach requires a commitment to the people who represent the company daily, recognizing that financial and human capital alone are not enough. By fostering a work environment that values transparency, accountability, and organizational support, high performance becomes a sustainable outcome. Drivers of High Performance High-performing workgroups excel in environments that empower employees, encourage critical thinking, and promote innovation. These groups prioritize their people, treating employees as capable individuals who can manage their own work. Instead of micromanaging, they set clear goals and provide the necessary resources, then step back to allow autonomy. This autonomy is balanced with accountability, fostering a culture of healthy debate to generate the best ideas and accepting passionate dissent with mutual respect. When employees feel trusted and challenged, they are more likely to deliver exceptional results. Leaders in high-performing teams facilitate critical thinking by providing comprehensive information, enabling informed decision-making. They ensure consistency between words and actions, separating facts from emotions. Effective leaders also protect their teams from organizational politics, securing budgets, equipment, and rule changes to support the team's success, allowing members to focus on achieving objectives. Innovation is key, and high performers thrive in a learning culture that embraces risk-taking. Continuous experimentation and learning from mistakes are essential for growth. Since innovation can lead to unexpected revenue, it's important for teams to feel safe to push boundaries and try new things without fear of failure. Leaders encourage this by publicly praising initiative, regardless of the outcome, reinforcing a mindset that equates the freedom to fail with the freedom to succeed. Elevating Mid-Level Teams Enhancing a company's overall performance often hinges on transforming average workgroups into high-performing ones. This strategy can double the number of top performers, yielding significant benefits. Focusing on the middle segment is more strategic than eliminating the weakest groups, as cutting nonperformers doesn't facilitate growth in developing new products, services, or markets. Moreover, upgrading middle performers is a more realistic and affordable approach than an extensive company-wide overhaul. To catalyze major performance improvements, forming a "SWAT team" of 8-10 respected and successful individuals from both high-performing and average groups is key. This team, with communal ties, is given regular time to identify issues, set goals, and craft solutions, with an executive advocate providing assistance as needed. This approach allows for the leveraging of internal resources without the need for expensive consultants. The SWAT team leads projects that encourage collaboration between the two segments, fostering innovative ideas and solutions. The team can be expanded ad-hoc by drafting additional members, and regular meetings are maintained until goals are met, followed by quarterly meetings. Communication of activities is done extensively through both formal and informal channels to ensure continual feedback, and successes and failures are shared transparently to avoid the creation of myths. By examining and upgrading the environments of average groups, this strategy effectively increases the ranks of high performers. While some companies focus on improving efficiencies, margins, and customer knowledge for growth, true expansion comes from spreading the successful practices of top workgroups across the organization. With little to lose and much to gain, this approach is worth considering for any company looking to enhance its performance.