The picture: Jacques, the manager of a large pipe manufacturing company, describes the team dynamics.
“A pipe, no matter how thick or long, is only as strong and reliable as its thinnest and weakest part. All of our pipes look great on the surface. Only when we run them through our scanners can we see if the pipe is suitable.” for shipping. Also, like our teams. We only know how competent, strong and functional they are under the stresses and strains of the daily demands of manufacturing. Sometimes they just explode!”
What is a team: A group of people who work in synchrony, with competence and motivation to achieve a common goal. A high-performing team has a dynamic, sometimes conflicting, energy that drives it forward in the service of achieving its goals.
A group is like: A lot of people on a bus. They all go in the same direction. Driven by the bus driver. People don’t talk to each other. They go up and down as they please. The only common point is the vehicle.
Action keywords/team phrases: Responsibility. Self-responsibility. Conflict. Problem resolution. Clear objectives. official leader. informal leaders. Celebration. Temporary. Individual roles are critical and subordinate to team goals.
“I” is each of the parts that make up the “we” that come together to form a larger “we”.
Equipment work pictures: Cirque du Soleil. Upper weapon. An aircraft carrier. A surgical team. A flashmob dance.
Dysfunctional groups: The Senate. Detroit Lions football team.
Each individual on a team is responsible for focus, achieving assigned goals, and internal processes that help or hinder progress.
Business is a team sport. In reality, life is a team sport, a fact that many people ignore at their peril.
A team without a leader is like a child without an adult to supervise. The best teams govern themselves and enforce their own peer-based discipline and have a formal leader to guide them. The Miami Dolphins without Don Shula would not have had a season without losses. Microsoft with Bill Gates? Apple without Steve Jobs?
A team generates and regulates a sense of unity among its disparate individuals. It also leverages individual performance into team responsibility and results.
Without an effective management team, a company may not be able to develop its teams.
Incompetence flows downhill.
Corporate policies and strategies do not make a high performance team culture.
Managers, as team leaders, have the opposite and tension-filled challenge of exercising the right authority and inclusion. That is the art.
It’s best when a team sets its own goals and processes based on input from its members. That’s the science.
A well-mixed team, made up of people with different styles and skills, and who are committed to the team, can deliver for the organization.
A high-functioning team is flexible enough to change, sometimes smoothly, sometimes turbulently, leadership roles among members to suit the situation.
