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IN THIS CHAPTER Smart Teams: The What For and Why Your Roadmap: Introducing the Team Effectiveness Model Measuring Your Team’s Progress How to Maintain High-Octane Group Functioning Smart Teams: The What For and Why When teams comprise people with various intellectual foundations and approaches to work . . . ideas often combine and combust in exciting and useful ways. Theresa Amabile (1999, p. 13) Today, most organizations face the difficult challenge of regaining or maintaining a competitive advantage. With intense global competition and deregulation, no organization is exempt from the myriad forces creating the need for organizational renewal (see, for example, Beer & Nohria, 2000; Ghoshal & Bartlett, 2000). In fact, it has become somewhat cliché to talk about the extraordinary complexity we face in our work environments. 1 1 Building Smart Teams: A Roadmap to High Performance An Introduction 01-Beatty.qxd 6/9/04 2:04 PM Page 1

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Page 1: Building Smart Teams: A Roadmap to High Performance · Building Smart Teams: A Roadmap to High Performance 3 Today’s Teams: The Move From Déjà Vu to Jamais Vu Executive development

IN THIS CHAPTER

❖ Smart Teams: The What For and Why

❖ Your Roadmap: Introducing the Team Effectiveness Model

❖ Measuring Your Team’s Progress

❖ How to Maintain High-Octane Group Functioning

Smart Teams: The What For and Why

When teams comprise people with various intellectual foundations andapproaches to work . . . ideas often combine and combust in exciting anduseful ways.

Theresa Amabile (1999, p. 13)

Today, most organizations face the difficult challenge of regaining ormaintaining a competitive advantage. With intense global competition andderegulation, no organization is exempt from the myriad forces creatingthe need for organizational renewal (see, for example, Beer & Nohria, 2000;Ghoshal & Bartlett, 2000). In fact, it has become somewhat cliché to talkabout the extraordinary complexity we face in our work environments.

1

1Building Smart Teams:A Roadmap to High

Performance

An Introduction

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When we ask managers to identify the factors and trends driving theneed for change in their organizations, they typically identify technologicalinnovations, higher customer expectations, new global entrants, increasedor decreased government regulations, and changing consumer demandsand demographics as being at the top of their lists. While the implicationsof these forces play out differently in each organization, all organizationsmust become adept at reading and responding swiftly and proactively tothe competitive forces. According to Goleman, Kaufmann, and Ray (1992),the ability to acquire, interpret, and act upon information with innovationsin processes and products is a core competitive capability.

To do this, organizations require ingenuity—clever, imaginative, out-of-the-box responses that allow them to flex with their many competitivedemands. This means that they must create favorable conditions forpeople to spontaneously come together to share knowledge and learn as theyexplore organizational challenges and identify novel ideas. Undoubtedly,teamwork is the most efficient way for organizations to encourage andharness this creative potential.

By teamwork, we mean real teamwork, whereby the right people withthe right skills, knowledge, and perspectives join to collectively explorechallenges, generate creative solutions, and work diligently to build thenecessary support and commitment for implementation. Not surprisingly,teams have been identified as an integral ingredient in developing and sus-taining a high-performance work culture. In his critical examination ofpeople management practices, Jeffrey Pfeffer described what leads to orga-nizational health. At the root of these people management practices isteamwork, “with decentralized decision-making and empowerment as thebasic principle of organizational design” (Pfeffer, 1999, p. 64).

Apart from the many performance benefits, working in teams can alsofacilitate employee satisfaction; in fact, our research shows that team per-formance and satisfaction are highly related (Beatty, 1997). As employeescontinue to seek meaningful and developmental work opportunities, teamscan provide a powerful avenue for learning, flexibility, job enhancement,and empowerment (Campion, Medsker, & Higgs, 1993). Real-time learningoccurs as members expand their expertise, knowledge, and experience.

Despite its many advantages, working in teams is increasingly hardwork in today’s rapidly evolving business world. For the team’s work to berelevant, their challenge is by nature complex. Why would an organizationinvest precious time and resources in an irrelevant challenge? The daysof teamwork for the sake of teamwork are long over. Today’s teams arecharged with complex, high-stakes issues that require clever innovation,resourcefulness, and disciplined action.

On many occasions, we have asked teams to assess the complexity oftheir challenges. More often than not, they describe initiatives that requiremembers to expand their thinking, to learn from each other and othersoutside of the immediate team, to build on existing know-how, to apply

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knowledge in new ways, and togo through many iterations ofcollecting and analyzing databefore a solution emerges.

Apart from the obvious taskcomplexity, teams also reportthat their challenges involvecomplex relationships; moreand more their challengesrequire that they work with andinvolve many stakeholders, oftenwith competing interests, biases,and ways of working. We referto challenges with high taskand relationship complexity asjamais vu challenges, in whichteam members have neverbeen there or done that beforetogether. Déjà vu challenges, onthe other hand, are those withlow complexity that the teamhas already mastered in the past.

Déjà vu challenges arerelatively simple to deal withbecause teams have developedexpertise over time to handlethem, and members follow aprescribed process with setroles and responsibilities. Buttoday, teams are more oftenconfronted with challenges theyhave never encountered beforeand where there is no specificpath to success. These jamais vuchallenges are all around us:Constitutional reform, culturechange, implementing a mergeror acquisition, or new strategyformation are all examples ofsystemwide change initiativesthat require team members tomanage complex relationshipswhile forging a new path.

So as the complexity of ourbusiness challenges increases, so

Building Smart Teams: A Roadmap to High Performance 3

Today’s Teams: The MoveFrom Déjà Vu to Jamais Vu

Executive development expert Peter DeLisle’stypology of task and relationship complexity,which we have adapted, is a useful toolfor considering a team’s work. A challengewith low task and relationship complexity isone in which familiar team members followa prescribed process with defined proce-dures. We call these déjà vu challenges—inother words, challenges that the team hasexperienced before. Examples may includethe admitting and treatment process followedby emergency room attendants, or protocolsadopted by firefighters for attending to a blaze.

In contrast, a challenge with high task andrelationship complexity is one where theplayers may not be familiar with workingtogether and do not have explicit protocolsor direct experience and know-how to applyto the task at hand. We call these jamais vuchallenges, which involve issues that theteam has never encountered before, whileteam members must learn to work together atthe same time. No one person has the rightanswer or all of the relevant expertise, andthe team must explore and experiment todiscover a solution.

An example of a highly complex challengewas the severe acute respiratory syndrome(SARS) epidemic, which was first reported inAsia in February 2003 and quickly spread tomore than two dozen countries withinmonths. Dubbed the mystery illness, SARSeventually claimed 44 lives in Canada and238 in Asia. In Canada, the absence of anational body for disease control meant thatspecialists and health care officials had tojoin forces quickly to first identify the mysteryvirus and then, through trial-and-error exper-imentation, develop protocols for diagnosis,

(continued)

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does the need for real teamwork.Well-designed teams can pro-vide the task and relationshipingenuity to survive and thrivein jamais vu territory. Yet realteamwork is often lacking. Inthe public sphere, for example,stories abound of governmentcouncils, tasked with greaterresponsibility, reduced budgets,and a more demanding public,spending their time bickeringrather than finding ways tocreate better results. In organi-zations, real senior teams arelargely a myth (Katzenbach,1997), even though cohesiveleadership from the top team ismore important than ever to theprocess of creating a mission, aguiding vision, and a strategy.Throughout the organization,teams must plan, implement,and build support for themany change projects that are

4 BUILDING SMART TEAMS

Low High

Hig

h

Relationship Complexity

Task Complexity

No-BrainerDéjà Vu

Jamais Vu

Figure 1.1 Our Team Challenges

(Continued)

treatment, prevention and disseminate criticalinformation to those in the field. Their laud-able efforts, although imperfect, led to theeventual containment of the highly infec-tious virus.

With jamais vu tasks, teams operating inthe same old ways and using the same mind-sets, processes, and tools designed for lesscomplex challenges will find themselves indeep water. Messy and ambiguous chal-lenges, ones that are hard to design and haveno prescribed right answer, require membersto explore, experiment, and evolve theirthinking together. These challenges requireteam protocols designed to encourage bothtask ingenuity and relationship ingenuity.Simply put, these teams must be designed totap into the know-how and perspectives ofrelevant stakeholders to create relevant,workable solutions that members and theirpartners are energized to implement.

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happening all at once. Often, we see half-hearted attempts that fail asmembers give up prematurely in the face of apparent resistance.

Effective teamwork at all levels of the organization is now a necessity,the foundation for the flexible, empowered, and high-performance culturethat organizations are desperately seeking to create. So the question is, howdo managers and leaders go about organizing for real teamwork?

To provide a roadmap to guide team leaders on this journey, we havedeveloped the Team Effectiveness Model based on comprehensiveresearch. Our model identifies the critical processes and skills that leadersneed to get their teams up and running quickly and to create smart teamsthat excel at accomplishing their objectives.

Your Roadmap: Introducingthe Team Effectiveness Model

We’ve all been part of successful and unsuccessful teams, and as such,we all have firsthand experience of the benefits and frustrations of teammembership. While some group experiences are very fulfilling, with mem-bers becoming highly skilled at working together, others are frustrating,with members developing interpersonal conflicts that are counterproduc-tive to team progress.

These experiences have taught us that participating on a team is notnecessarily easy, and for many of us it does not come naturally. Team suc-cess depends on a number of factors, including attracting the right peopleto work on a common goal, enabling them to begin working togetherwell and quickly, setting and adhering to performance schedules, and,inevitably, handling the interpersonal stresses that occur when peoplework together closely.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for a team member is the struggle andresulting tension that arises from being an individual—with one’s owntalents, biases, values, beliefs, interests, and ways of working—versusbeing a member of a team. Being part of a team requires members toinvolve others in making important decisions, to share critical informa-tion openly, and, at times, to sacrifice one’s personal agenda for thegood of the team. The challenge, of course, is to harness the group cre-ativity that comes from an open exchange of ideas and opinions toproduce an integrated solution that builds on the best of the individualthinking. Maintaining the balance between fostering diverse thinkingand controlling these differences is often easier said than done (Burke,1988).

So despite the many potential benefits of effective teamwork, includingincreased performance, improved decision quality, high commitment togroup decisions, and increased job satisfaction (Hackman, 1990), team

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membership requires a new orientation to working, and most membersneed to learn how to be part of a team. Marvin Weisbord (1987) suggeststhat management teams actually have to unlearn “bad habits” becausemost organizational cultures have rewarded individual results and com-petitive behaviors, not cooperation and teamwork.

We believe that most individuals can learn to be good team membersand reap the personal and professional rewards of team membership. Ourresearch suggests that by undertaking several key activities, organizationscan give their teams a strong foundation for success.

SIGNPOSTS TO GROUP INGENUITY:CRITICAL PROCESS AND SKILLS

Our model (Beatty, 2003) has narrowed the key success factors of high-performing teams to three critical sets of processes and skills. These keyprocesses and skills predict both team performance (how well the teamperforms its assigned tasks) and team satisfaction (the extent to whichmembers enjoy and derive personal gains from their team experiences).They include the following:

❖ Team management practices

❖ Problem-solving skills

❖ Conflict-handling skills

We like to think of the building of these skills as base camp forteams; that is, the work involved in developing effective team manage-ment practices, problem-solving skills, and conflict-handling skills isakin to base camp for mountain climbers. Just as successful mountainclimbers must spend sufficient time preparing for their ascent by plan-ning their route, testing equipment, delineating roles and responsibili-ties, adapting to the climate, and stocking supplies, teams must devotesufficient time and energy to developing effective team managementpractices, problem-solving abilities, and conflict-handling processes. Asteams spend time building these essential skills, they learn to work effec-tively together.

ALL FOR ONE: TOP TEAM MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

Team management practices refer to the overall level of team commit-ment, social functioning, and task approaches of the team. With effectiveteam management practices in place, a group possesses the followingcharacteristics:

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Building Smart Teams: A Roadmap to High Performance 7

Conflict-HandlingSkills

NormsViolations

OrganizationalSupport

Individualistic WorkOrientation

TEAM MANAGEMENTPRACTICES

CONFLICT-HANDLING SKILLS

TEAMPERFORMANCE

TEAMSATISFACTION

(−)(−)

(−)(−)

PROBLEM-SOLVINGSKILLS

Figure 1.2 Team Effectiveness Model

Task Processes

1. A common purpose with set goals, priorities, and task strategies

2. Defined tasks with clear authority and responsibilities assigned tomembers

Social Processes

3. Protocols and norms for working together—that is, processes forproblem solving, conflict handling, evaluation, inclusion, and so forth

4. Clear roles and responsibilities to ensure that members’ talents arefully utilized

Commitment

5. Committed members who are willing to pull their share andexert extra effort to ensure that the team tasks are completed onschedule

Good team management practices are very important to establish inthe early stages of team development. As such, we highly recommendthat team-building efforts begin with the team defining their purposeand goals, followed by roles and responsibilities, and then norms andprotocols. As the team develops and works together, commitment andmotivation should naturally follow. Later on, the team managementpractices may become second nature to the high-performance teamand may even go unnoticed and unappreciated. However, establishingthese practices up front can ensure that the team gets off to a goodstart.

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From Predicament to Ingenuity: Problem Solving for Pros

Teams with strong problem-solving skills possess the communicationand interpersonal skills necessary to work effectively. Team members arepatient communicators; they work hard to understand each other andmake themselves understood. Difficulties in understanding are attrib-uted to the communications process in general, not to other members’failings. Group members follow an agreed-upon process for exploringproblems and challenges, collecting information, developing options,and evaluating and selecting a workable solution. It is the combinationof these skill sets that fosters synergistic decision making, whereby theteam together develops solutions that are better than the sum of indi-vidual ideas.

From Chaos to Creativity: Conflict Handling for Results

Conflict-handling skills refer to the group’s ability to resolve conflicts asthey occur. Teams that demonstrate good team management practices andpossess problem-solving skills experience less conflict. However, conflictdoes occur and high-performance teams have a strategy in place to dealwith it. They do not avoid thorny issues. They work to identify and under-stand the underlying issues and to deal with them effectively. In dealingwith the difficult situation, members do not let issues fester and grow intointerpersonal stresses between members. Rather, they address the issuesand move on, putting in place a process or protocol for resolving similarconflicts in the future.

Measuring Your Team’s Progress

How do you measure team success? When we ask teams this question,most identify task performance variables, such as accomplishing theirgoal or exceeding customer requirements, as well as personal satisfactionvariables, such as feelings of accomplishment, mastery of new skills, and asense of belonging. We suggest that both are critically important to teameffectiveness.

Intuitively, this makes a lot of sense. If the team works cohesively butdoes not deliver the performance required by its customers or supervisors,it is not high functioning. Conversely, teams that achieve their goals but donot develop the goodwill and commitment of their members only frus-trate their ability to work together on future tasks. It is when both task andsocial functioning are high that teams can excel by creating a climate where

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group members commit to participating fully and become personallyinvested in the team.

Therefore, our model provides a measure of both team performance andteam satisfaction. Team performance measures the degree to which the groupagrees that its productive output—whether a product, service, or decision—meets the needs for quality, quantity, and service expected by its customers.Team satisfaction measures the extent to which group members enjoy beinga member of the team and experience the social rewards of membership,such as learning, development, and a sense of belonging. Satisfied teammembers are committed to achieving their tasks and remaining on the team.

We found that measuring performance and satisfaction was much morecomplex than simply counting outputs. First, we asked the team spon-sors—professors for the learning teams or managers for the industryteams—to subjectively assess how well their teams were doing with respectto both progress toward goals and satisfaction among members. Rathersurprisingly, we found that both professors and managers had very littleintuitive sense of how well their teams were doing. In fact, many were verysurprised to find that their teams were experiencing difficulties.

Next, we attempted to measure task-related outputs such as marks for thelearning teams and product or service outputs for the industry teams. Herewe also found low consistency between the manager’s or professor’s assess-ment of the team’s performance and the team’s assessment of how well theywere doing. We also found a high variance of assessments among the differ-ent professors and managers to whom the teams reported. In other words,we found that various managers or professors did not agree about how wellthe team was performing. So we decided that the team’s own assessment wasprobably the best one. Teams may well inflate their ratings of performance.But if all teams do so to roughly the same extent, it still allows us to arraythem on a measurement scale from lower to higher performance. In otherwords, we can compare them and analyze them statistically.

In the end, we chose to rely on each team’s assessment of their perfor-mance and satisfaction levels. Only the team truly knows how well it isperforming and how skilled members are at working together, given themany challenges and obstacles encountered en route to goal completion. Insupport of this approach, we found a high degree of consistency among theteam members’ scores for performance and satisfaction, adding credence toour view that the team members know best how they are doing.

How to Maintain High-Octane Group Functioning

At the heart of improving group effectiveness is the ability of groupmembers to reflect on what they are doing well and how they need to

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improve—that is, what they need to start doing, what they should stopdoing, and what they should continue doing. However, most groups findit difficult to examine their behavior on their own and wonder where tobegin. Our model provides teams with a diagnostic guide for assessinghow well they are doing and for determining where they need to focustheir energy on skill development.

So, for example, teams often ask us questions like, “We got off to a greatstart, but it seems as though we are losing focus. How do we get it back?”or “Some members are coming late or not completing their team work ontime. How do we rebuild their commitment to the team?” or “Some mem-bers can’t work together; what should we do?”

Just as a physician uses patients’ vital signs to determine their healthand detect possible ailments, teams can use the Team Effectiveness Modelto assess where and how the team needs to improve. When stalled, teamscan do an overall diagnosis using our Team Effectiveness Model GapAnalyzer (see page 12, or page 115 in the Exercises section) to obtain anoverview of areas of most and least effectiveness. Next, a team can zoomin directly on the three key success factors of high-functioning teamsusing our specific diagnostic instruments:

Team Management Practices: Do members understand and agree on theirtask? Have team members created and internalized their team norms ofconduct? Do members have the necessary skills, expertise, perspectives,and resources to do their work? Is the team aligned with the interests of itsstakeholders? Do team members feel supported by the organization? Domembers feel safe to express their views and contribute fully? Are mem-bers committed to exerting the necessary effort for task accomplishment?(For a more detailed analysis, refer to the Team Management PracticesAssessment on page 117 for an instrument to provide the answers to thesequestions.)

Problem Solving: Are members patient communicators? Do they take thetime to truly understand each other’s points of view and contributions?Do members evaluate potential ideas and solutions before they discardthem or adopt them? Do they build on each other’s ideas to create syner-gistic solutions? Are simple decisions overanalyzed? Are members fol-lowing an agreed-upon problem-solving process for collectinginformation, exploring options, evaluating solutions, and making deci-sions, or are they jumping to conclusions? (Refer to the Team Problem-Solving Assessment on page 145 for a way to explore these issues withyour team.)

Conflict Handling: Are members avoiding conflict? Do members exam-ine all views or simply avoid conflict to speed decision making along?Are important decisions being made prematurely? Do thorny issuesremain under the table? Are disruptive behaviors blocking the team

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from achieving their goals? (Refer to the Handling Problems in TeamDiscussion Assessment on page 182 to help answer these questions.)

Each of the three chapters that follow is devoted to one of these keyfactors for effective teams: team management practices, problem solving,and conflict handling. In addition, we’ve included structured and stimu-lating exercises to guide you along the path toward creating your ownhigh-efficiency teams.

The Team Effectiveness Gap Analyzer provides an excellent place for ateam to begin, allowing an overall assessment both of what is in goodshape and of where there are gaps that need to be bridged. Teams can learnwhether they are ready, getting ready, moving slowly, or stalled in each ofthe three key areas for working together effectively.

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12 BUILDING SMART TEAMS

Level

4Ready

(“Watchour dust!”)

3Getting

Ready(“We’re onthe righttrack”)

Team Management Practices

Team purpose and goals areclearly defined and compellingand our whole team is focusedon achieving them.

Members are workingcollectively, tapping the fullpotential of all and creatingsuperior results.

We have a well-defined approachfor tackling our challenges andit is working for us.

Relationships with keystakeholders are well defined,productive, and focused on theoverall goals.

Our team norms are wellestablished and everybodyabides by them. All individualsare included and respected asfull, contributing members.

All members are fully committedto the team and its purpose.

Team purpose and goalsare becoming clear. The teamis on the right track forcompleting our purpose,vision, priorities, and goals.

Members are committed toworking collectively, and weare learning how to tap intothe full potential of all.

We are defining/tweaking ourapproach for tackling ourchallenges, and more oftenthan not, the approach isworking for us. Results arecoming nicely.

Relationships with keystakeholders are well definedand for the most part areworking.

We are establishing team norms.Most of the time we areunafraid to confront difficultiesand to discuss ways of workingtogether more productively.

Commitment to the team is fairlyhigh.

Problem Solving

Our team creates ingenious“1 + 1 > 2” solutions.We use communicationpatience skills to fosterdialogue, shareimportant knowledge,and exploreassumptions.

We use synergy tools tohelp members expandtheir thinking, generateand build on ideas, andevaluate those ideas toarrive at superiorsolutions.

We use the right processtools to guide our work.

We discuss and agree uponsound approaches toproblem solving, and wecollect the relevantinformation beforejumping into discussionsabout solutions.

Our team is learning howto create breakthrough“1 + 1 > 2” solutions.When we usecommunication patienceand synergy tools, wearrive at superiorsolutions.

Our process tools arehelping guide our workand expand our creativethinking.

We are beginning to bedisciplined about howwe approach problemsolving and have putmore structure aroundour discussions.

Conflict Handling

We have established ateam climate thatwelcomes andaccepts diversepoints of view, andour members feelsafe to expressthemselves fully.

We understand thatconflict is a normaland natural part ofteam life. Whenconflicts do occur,we pause anddiscuss how we canmove forward.

We then develop aprotocol to help usprevent similarconflicts in thefuture.

We do not allowconflict to becomepersonalized.

We’re working hard topromote a teamclimate thatwelcomes diverseviews so thatmembers feel safe toexpress themselves.

When conflicts dooccur, we pause anddiscuss how we canmove forward.

Team Effectiveness Model Gap Analyzer

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Building Smart Teams: A Roadmap to High Performance 13

Level

2Moving

Slowly(“We’re noton trackyet”)

1Stalled

(“We arespinningourwheels“)

Team Management Practices

Loosely defined goals providesome focus and direction.

We’re beginning to recognizethat a clear purpose andvision are important.

We recognize that we are nottapping the full potential ofall, and as a result, we’renot producing the resultsexpected of us.

We do not have the rightapproach or strategy fortackling our challenges, andthis is slowing us down.

Experience has taught us thatwe need to fosterrelationships with keystakeholders. We’rebeginning to identify, clarify,and develop relationshipswith key groups.

Team norms are looselydefined. Sometimes we donot live up to the great ideasthat we had initiallydiscussed for workingtogether.

Commitment of somemembers to the teamis uneven.

We have no concept of ourpurpose or vision.

We do not have a usefulapproach or strategy fortackling our challenges, andthis is slowing us down.Roles and responsibilitiesare unclear, resulting inconfusion and frustration.

Relationships with keystakeholder groups areunclear or not viewed asimportant.

Team norms do not exist.People disagree over howwe should be workingtogether, and conflict isglossed over or ignored.

Some members are notcommitted to the team at all.

Problem Solving

Our team creates“1 + 1 = 2“ solutions.Our team meetings arefocused on sharinginformation from eachmember’s area ofresponsibility. We donot use processes andtechniques to identifycommon challenges,share relevantinformation, build oneach other’s ideas, orgenerate solutions thatbenefit all members andstakeholders. At best,we operate as a groupinstead of a real team.

We are not disciplined inour problem-solvingapproach, and ourdiscussions seem attimes to be going incircles.

We do not base ourdiscussions nearlyenough on soundinformation, but ratheron members’ opinionsand intuitions.

Our team creates“1 + 1 < 2“ solutions.Our team meetings arechaotic, with membersinterrupting,grandstanding,withholdinginformation,and so on.

Our inability to generateworkable solutionsstops progressive actionand blocks people frommoving forward onimportant issues.

Conflict Handling

Our team climate doesnot always welcomediverse views, andmembers are oftenuncomfortable withexpressing theirthoughts andfeelings.

We have no protocolsin place to help usmanage conflicteffectively. As aresult, conflicts oftensteer us off track andblock us frommoving forward.

Our team climate doesnot welcome diverseviews and membersdo not feel safe toexpress themselves.

We have no protocolsin place to help usmanage conflicteffectively. As aresult, conflicts oftensteer us off track andblock us frommoving forward.

Members havepersonalized theconflicts, and cliqueshave formed tocreate “we–they”separations.

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