TEAMS

What is a team?
Definition

A team is a small number of people with

complementary skills who are committed
to a common purpose, set of performance
goals, and approach for which they hold
themselves mutually accountable. – Jon
Katzenbach & Douglas Smith

Working together
Common goal
Sum greater than individual parts
accountability
Characteristics of high
performing teams

• Shared purpose or meaning

• Goals, long- and short-term
• Communications
• A plan…strategy and tactics
• Leadership
• Complementary skills, interdependence
• Mutual accountability
• Trust
• Healthy conflict
• Results focus
• Commitment
 Workplace advantages
of teams

• Increased productivity
• Higher quality
• Reduced turnover
• Higher job satisfaction, lower burnout & turnover
• Increased innovation, creativity & flexibility
• Increased morale
Inhibitors to team success

• Rewarding and recognising individuals

not teams
• Team instability
• Not facilitating individual autonomy
• No fostering interdependence
• Not providing orientation
Promotors of team success

• Composition, heterogeneity
• Size
• Familiarity
• Motivation
• Team potency
• Goals
• Rewards
• Feedback
• Team structure
• Team member autonomy
• Team norms
• Decision making processes
Are you a good team member?
Stages of team development
Tuckman Model
Bruce Tuckman
Educational psychologist, Ohio State
Group dynamics
Group development model
Developmental sequence in small groups
Learning and motivations strategy
Also procrastination
Elisabeth Kubler Ross

Psychiatrist
Time Magazine – one of the 100 most important
thinkers c20

5 stages of grief
General change model
Team performance curve / Change curve
Lifecycle of a team

• Forming
• Storming
• Norming
• Performing

• Every effective team goes through

these life cycle stages
 Forming
• Team members are introduced and begin
getting to know each other
• Goals and tasks are established
• Generally polite behaviour among members
• Norms are not yet understood
Storming
• Members are sizing each other
up and may feel more
comfortable and voice their
views
• Members may compete for team
roles and to identify their unique
team role
• May argue about goals or how
they should be accomplished
• May choose sides against other
members
 Norming
• Once issues are resolved, agreement occurs around
team norms and expectations
• Trust and common interests are developing
• Roles and objectives are clarified and understood
• Potential pressure to conform

• Team characteristics at this stage: Cooperativeness,

Conformity to standards and expectations,
Heightened , interpersonal attraction, Ignoring
disagreements
Performing
• Members make contributions and
are motivated by results
• Leadership is shared according to
members’ knowledge and skills
• Norms and culture are well
understood
• Tasks get accomplished effectively
and efficiently
• Mutual trust and focus on
continuous improvement.
Adjourning (mourning?)
• In the adjourning stage, most of the team's goals have been accomplished.
The emphasis is on wrapping up final tasks and documenting the effort and
results. As the work load is diminished, individual members may be
reassigned to other teams, and the team disbands.

• Important elements here

• closure
• Recognition for the work accomplished
• Two points remembered – low point and end point (make end point
matter)
Tuckman – final comments
• Conflict during the Storming stage is NOT a sign of a defective team – it’s a necessary and productive
precondition for success and innovative thinking. Conflict can be productive if handled well, but destructive
if managed poorly.
• It’s OK to return to a previous stage if circumstances warrant.
• Potential issues
• Stage metaphor – what if stages are missed?
• Causation – what allows movement between stages?
• Pedagogical concerns
• Self-fulfilling prophecy?
• Generalizability

• Tuckman’s model and its derivatives are powerful, insightful and useful tools for understanding your team
dynamics, but his stages are not necessarily prerequisites for success, and this is not the only successful
model of successful teamwork.
Diversity in teams
Research shows one of the strongest predictors of team success is a
diverse range of team members.
Positive implications of diverse teams include
1. Increased creativity and innovation (Boston Consulting)
2. Better and faster problem solving and decision making (HBR)
3. Increased profit (gender diversity +20%, ethnic diversity +33%,
McKinsey)
4. Higher employee engagement (Deloitte)
5. Better reputation (PWC)
Team Roles
Discussion: What do you think are the
different roles in great teams?
 Belbin Team Roles
A tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with
others in a particular way when working in a team

• The skill or individual excellence of the team Manageable

roles they
members was not a predictor of a team’s can assume
results.
• The way that the individual members behaved
contributed to or detracted from the team’s Least Role
preferred categories
effectiveness. roles

• There are 9 predictable behaviour patterns or Natural or

preferred
“team roles” roles
 Action orientated People orientated
Thinking roles
roles roles
• Plant • Shaper • Co-ordinator
• Monitor Evaluator • Implementer • Team worker
• Specialist • Completer/Finisher • Resource
investigator
5 dysfunctions of a team
Lencioni, 2002
“The fact remains that teams, because they are made up of imperfect
human beings, are inherently dysfunctional.“

Discuss!

“But that is not to say that teamwork is doomed. Far from it. In fact,
building a strong team is both possible and remarkably simple. But it is
painfully difficult.”
What gives you your
competitive/performance advantage?
It’s not finance, strategy or technology
It’s teamwork

Related question: What is teamwork?

• There is no way to put working together as a team on a gantt chart or
as a budget item
• It’s a choice
5 characteristics of high performing teams
5 5 Results focus

4 accountability 4
3 3 Commitment

2 Healthy conflict 2
1 1 Trust
 Invulnerability
Absence of trust
What is trust?

In the context of team building, trust is the confidence among team members that their
peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be careful around the group

Familiarity, vulnerability

Invulnerability was seen as a sign of strength

weakness the opposite
therefor people not honest
Cant have trust without honest
Trusting teams
• Admit weaknesses & mistakes
• Ask for help
• Accept questions and input about their areas of responsibility
• Give one another the benefit of the doubt before arriving at a
negative conclusion
• Take risks in offering feedback and assistance
• Appreciate and tap into one another’s skills and experiences
• Focus time and energy on important issues, not politics
• Offer and accept apologies without hesitation
• Look forward to meetings and other opportunities to work as a group
 Members of teams with an
absence of trust...
• Conceal their weaknesses & mistakes from one another
• Hesitate to ask for help or provide constructive feedback
• Hesitate to offer help outside their own area of
responsibility
• Jump to conclusions about the intentions and aptitudes of
others without attempting to clarify them
• Fail to recognize and tap into one another’s skills and
experiences
• Waste time and energy managing their behaviors for
effect
• Hold grudges
• Dread meetings and find reasons to avoid spending time
together
Impact of absence
of trust?
Low morale
Reduction in productivity
Reduction in performance
Increased absenteeism
Fear of conflict
Artificial harmony
Fear of conflict
• If trust is not present, people will not engage one another
• Artificial harmony
• Important decisions will not be made
• People become angry (tension build up)
• Conflict can be good
• If it is ideologically based
• If it avoids personality-focused, mean-spirited attacks
• Teams generally avoid this to spare one another’s feelings
Dysfunction 2: Fear of Conflict

Teams that fear conflict...

• Have boring meetings

• Create environments where back-channel politics and personal
attacks thrive
• Ignore controversial topics that are critical to team success
• Fail to tap into all the opinions and perspectives of team
members
• Waste time and energy with posturing and interpersonal risk
management
Dysfunction 2: Fear of Conflict
Teams that engage in conflict...

• Have lively, interesting meetings

• Extract and exploit the ideas of all team members
• Solve real problems quickly
• Minimize politics
• Put critical topics on the table for discussion
 Conflict can be Counterproductive
• Lower productivity
• Increased stress
• Increased frustration due to time loss
• May lead to,
• “You are either with us or against us”
• Reduced trust
• Win/Lose or Lose/Lose mentality; decision made
emotionally
Conflict can be Productive
• Increased creativity
• Encourages stronger emotional skills
• Encourage to become better negotiators
• Learn more about each other’s needs (yours and theirs)
• Learn about other’s values, culture and ideology
• Encourages to question the status quo
Dad at the Glen L Martin Co
Aims

• Engage open discussion around key issues

• Support productive conflict

Tools
Creating
• First, build trust
• Reinforce/encourage healthy debate “good”
• Develop team norms/ground rules for conflict
• Probe for conflict, differences of opinion (mining
=Extract buried disagreements and shed light on
conflict
them
• Don’t shy away from sensitivy issues – call them
out and work on them
• Understand individual conflict styles
Lack of commitment
• People become ambiguous
• People will not buy-in if they do not have an opportunity to weigh-
in
• Failure to achieve buy -in from the “first team” filters down
• The two greatest causes are:
• Desire for consensus
• The need for certainty
Desire for consensus
• Complete agreement is often not possible, but buy-in is always
possible
• Reasonable people do not need to “get their way” in order to support
a decision, but they do need to have their opinion or option
considered
• You must consider all opinions
• If your group is at an impasse, the leader makes the call
The need for certainty
• A decision is better than no decision
• Waffling is worse than making a bold decision that later proves to be
wrong
• You can always change course
• Delaying decisions leads to paralysis and loss of confidence

• A team leader must be comfortable making a decision that turns out

to be wrong. A team leader must push the group for closure around
issues and adherence to schedule.
Disagree and commit
Scott MyNealy “Agree and commit, disagree and
commit, or get out of the way”

Andrew Gove “Disagree and Commit”

Jeff Bezos “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit”

Contemporary example
Dysfunction 3: Failure to Commit
A Team that fails to commit...
• Creates ambiguity among the team about direction and priorities
• Watches windows of opportunity close due to excessive analysis and unnecessary
delay
• Breeds lack of confidence and fear of failure
• Revisits discussions and decisions again and again
• Encourages second-guessing among team members
Dysfunction 3: Failure to Commit
A Team that commits...

• Creates clarity around direction and priorities

• Aligns the entire team around common objectives
• Develops an ability to learn from mistakes
• Takes advantage of opportunities before competitors do
• Moves forward without hesitation
• Changes direction without hesitation or guilt
 • People do this to avoid uncomfortable
situations
• This is really difficult in peer-to-peer
situations
• No buy-in, no accountability
Avoidance of
• You need team members willing to call
accountability their peers on performance or behaviors
that might hurt the team
• The closer the team members, the
greater the danger
 A Team that avoids accountability...

Creates resentment among team members

who have different standards of performance
Dysfunction 4:
Avoidance of Encourages mediocrity

Accountability
Misses deadlines and key deliverables

Places an undue burden on the team leader as

the sole source of discipline
Dysfunction 4: Avoidance of Accountability
A Team that holds one another accountable...

• Ensures that poor performers feel pressure to improve

• Identifies potential problems quickly by questioning one another’s approaches
without hesitation
• Establishes respect among team members who are held to the same high
standards
• Avoids excessive bureaucracy around performance management and corrective
action
 • Ego and status get in the way
Inattention to • Doing “our job” is not enough
• Being part of the team is not enough

results • Goals are not common

• Negative language
• Use we and us instead of you and I
• Politics
• Foster an environment where people can say what they think
• Lack of focus
• A laser-like focus on the objectives and outcomes is required
or people revert to individual status or a “just happy to be
here” attitude
Dysfunction 5:
Inattention to
Results
How to solve inattention to
results
Case Study – tagging bears
Bear tagging – Case study, questions
1. List and explain the Belbin team roles you see in this video?
2. List and explain the team dysfunctions (or elements of high
performing teams you see in this video?
3. What stage of development is this team at? Evidence your answer.