Organizations can reap many long-term benefits by encouraging employees to work smart together. Personal power and influence go a long way in creating and managing successful organizations. However, most of the work that is done in organizations requires several people to work together to achieve a goal.
Just imagine the immense potential that comes from collaboration. Meetings offer the ideal opportunity to collaborate. Although a meeting is the convening of a group, the nature and management of groups seems to be one of the deepest mysteries of organizational life. How can managers transform groups into powerful teams? Despite a group’s attempts to “get it done,” stifling
Conformity hampers many groups, and powerful business concepts like empowerment, teams, and synergy become simplistic and ineffective buzzwords.
Why bother?
If groups are so troublesome, why bother with them? Why do we keep having staff meetings, task force meetings, operations meetings, team building, planning meetings, and all the other kinds of meetings we love to hate?
We work in groups for three reasons. First, only several people working together can achieve goals of the size and complexity required by most organizations. Second, when productivity and creativity are needed, they can come from the synergy of differences in backgrounds: ability, rank, role, age, race, and gender. Third, there are usually several stakeholders or individuals who are most involved in decisions related to the organization’s objectives and want to participate in the decision-making process.
Consequently, groups are the fundamental units of organizations. And indeed, they can save time. Group meetings are the most effective means of communication between people who need to share information and come to a common understanding about that data so that they can make and implement good
Decisions Complex tasks require extensive dialogue if they are to be done well. Letters, memos, voice messages, emails, and other non-dialogue media are useful for documenting meeting outcomes; however, they do not allow for the reciprocity that is critical to effective communication.
Some managers try to coordinate a small number of employees by meeting one on one with each person involved in the task or project. This school of management holds that if everyone just does their job, everything will be fine. Such a philosophy is effective for relatively simple tasks that do not require much coordination. For example, a claims processing unit at an insurance company can function effectively without meetings.
Other managers who have been the victim of too many unproductive meetings eliminate group meetings altogether and suffer the consequences as more and more stuff gets lost, more deadlines are missed, and more productivity is lost due to misunderstandings. Other managers avoid these traps by imposing strict time limits. With this approach, anything people can cover in the time allowed will work fine, and anything not covered, even if important, is left to the whims of individual effort.
In general, many managers and their employees see their group meetings as useful, even fun, and many others see them as a necessary evil. What is the problem here? Why don’t intelligent, well-intentioned, warm-hearted, and get along together work as a collective?
There are three basic reasons. First, many managers do not recognize the holistic and systemic nature of groups. Second, many of them are not competent enough to handle conflicts. And third, many do not have the skills to use differences within groups to make good synergistic decisions that are fully owned by all involved.
effective groups
Group effectiveness is an uphill battle, largely due to our negative beliefs about groups, which have been reinforced over time. Our beliefs become self-fulfilling as we expect our newest group to be just like everyone else. We assume that the power dynamic will be win-lose, that our ideas will not receive attention or our warnings will not be heeded, that the real problems will not surface. We can try to be a positive force within a group, but soon give up when we don’t get the support of others, who may, however, later tell us that our ideas hit the mark.
Powerful individual action can certainly create positive change in a group dynamic, yet such action is too often viewed as beyond perceived norms of acceptable behavior and unlikely to succeed, a perception difficult to overcome. Consequently, beliefs about the group solidify into ineffective behavior that appears to defy attempts at constructive change. Such groups become discouraged when their members collectively resign themselves to not being able to make a difference. Not surprisingly, a common response is “Oh no, not another meeting!”
Regardless of these issues, a lot can be done to make the group effective and then build them into powerful teams. Developing effectiveness in groups requires a basic level of functionality minus the hostility, conformity, or discouraged boredom that wastes so much productivity. Effective groups become powerful teams when they learn from differences, empower their members, and make consensual decisions. Powerful teams contribute substantially to the creation of infinite organizations.
