The Importance of Teams, Why the Best Leaders Cultivate Them & Making Teams Work

Note: Mark Suster originally published the majority of this post on April 17, 2016. I am reposting most of it here with my edits and additions because the content is relevant to most of our small businesses. Getting our teams to work efficiently and more is challenging. When doing teamwork properly, the results are transformative and much more than the sum of the individual parts. Never one to just raise a topic, I have added extensively to the original to give actionable strategies to make teams work efficiently to deliver results.

 

I was watching my favorite show on TV this morning — GPS (Global Public Square) with Fareed Zakaria. It is a hugely compelling show because Zakaria covers world issues that will affect all of us in ways that are accessible and with frameworks for processing disparate information. He brings knowledgable experts from varying points of view but never books anybody that engages in yelling matches.

The show has become my best curator of which books to read (including my favorite of last year, The Accidental Superpower) and my go to for understanding geopolitics of Russia, Iran, Pakistan, China, India and of course the US. But they also take on issues in science, technology, and management. Essentially it’s a replacement for reading The Economist every week (which I would do if I could find more time!). Example from this morning was a quick discussion on the “Brexit” and whether the UK will exit Europe.

This morning’s show took on the topic of “teams” and highlighted research that Julia Rozovsky and Google has conducted called Project Aristotle and profiled in Charles Duhigg’s book Smarter, Faster, Better. I haven’t read the book nor deeply reviewed Project Aristotle but the conversation on this morning’s show really resonated with me.

Rozovsky basically said that having studied 180 teams at Google over the past several years and trying to determine what made some teams perform better than others (despite every team being filled with over-achievers who work at Google) one factor stood out more than others: Creating “psychologically safe environments.” The idea is that teams that allow everybody to speak, allow dissent, encourage safe discussions where it’s ok to be wrong — succeed more.

I’m recounting this from having watched the show (I’m sure it will be online within the week), and I’m going to spend some more time reading about Project Aristotle. But the conversation rang very true for me.

Making Teams work

Teams are by definition made up of individuals who have been brought together to achieve particular objectives that they would not be able to reach individually. It would be fantastic if teams started working smoothly from day one. However, this rarely happens as we all know from experience. We have all been in teams where members are in conflict even open warfare, people duplicating roles and tasks, members not being motivated to contribute to the team effort, team members undermining each other, and rebellion against team leaders.

The approach and actions of the group’s leader are fundamental to making teams work smoothly. They play a crucial role in every stage of making teams function, from the formation through to evaluation and Here are five key areas for team managers to address in every group situation.

1. Creating an Active Team

A good team leader articulates a vision for the future of the team. They fully appreciate the benefits that teamwork brings including reducing isolation, sharing the load, utilising people’s skills and enhancing motivation. Leaders of successful teams establish clear objectives for the team, based on overall departmental goals. They convey their vision to the team at every opportunity.

To set up and manage effective teams, managers need to:

• understand the value of teams at work

Teamwork is about individuals working together to accomplish more than they could alone – and then sharing the rewards.

Working life is too complicated to be negotiated comfortably by any one person acting in isolation. And working in a good team is exciting, stimulating, supportive, successful – and fun!

• Appreciate that diversity in the team is a strength if it’s well managed

A team harnesses, pools and exploits the strengths, skills, and experience of its members, and so compensate for areas of individual weakness. One person’s weakness is often another’s strength; one person’s ignorance, another’s expertise.

Bringing together individuals with diverse views should improve the quality of decision-making, and will certainly increase versatility. A little criticism and disunity help keep a team on its toes, and the right balance of personalities can make the difference between a winning and a losing team.

• Explore techniques for team leadership

Teams need leaders who are respected and influential enough to get others to listen to them. Effective leaders are good communicators and know how to involve everyone, including those who are reluctant to play their part. Leaders should be able to co-ordinate work and build contacts outside the team.

Teams also need leaders with linking skills; that is the ability to unite the team and help it become balanced and cohesive.

2. Team Roles

Meredith Belbin, the big daddy of the role team concept, studied team-work for many years, and he famously observed that people in teams tend to assume different “team roles.” He defined a team role as “a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way.”

Belbin’s nine team roles

Resource investigator	·    extrovert, enthusiastic, curious, communicative. ·    a capacity for contacting people and exploring anything new, with an ability to respond to the challenge.
Completer	·    painstaking, orderly, conscientious, anxious. ·    a capacity for following through, perfectionism.
Teamworker	·    socially-oriented, rather mild, sensitive. ·    an ability to respond to people and situations and to promote team spirit.
Monitor-evaluator	·    sober, unemotional, prudent. ·    judgement, discretion, hard-headedness.
Plant	·    individualistic, serious-minded, unorthodox. ·    genius, imagination, intellect, knowledge.
Shaper	·    highly-strung, outgoing, dynamic. ·    drive, readiness to challenge things like inertia, ineffectiveness, complacency, and self-deception.
Co-ordinator	·    calm, controlled, self-confident. ·    a capacity for treating and welcoming all potential contributors on their merits, without prejudice and with a strong sense of objectives.
Implementer	·    conservative, dutiful and predictable. ·    good organising ability, common sense, hard work, self-discipline.

It is worth emphasising that Belbin and many others who have developed the team role such as Margerison & McCann have at no time suggested nor proposed that every team must comprise a minimum of 9 members who each took on these roles. A more useful way of utilising the team role concept is to accept that these personas must all be accommodated for in every team, regardless of the size. It is far more important that team members understand their strengths while being flexible enough to adopt other roles that need doing even if they are not their forte.

It helps to work out team members’ roles and responsibilities. Make a chart so that everyone knows what everyone else should be doing, and communicate it inside and outside the team.

3. Managing Teams

Think about some of the things that have made teams you have been part of work well – I have no doubt there are many and varied things on your list. 

Ground rules

One often forgotten component that is critical for successful teamwork is setting the ground rules so that every member starts from the same hymn sheet. Unless the team leader provides a good foundation, the team may be a very sociable environment, but it will not be very productive.

Here are some of the key elements that comprise ground rules.

• Direction – Articulate a vision for the future. Establish clear objectives for the team, based on overall departmental goals. Convey your vision to the team at every opportunity.
• Roles – Work out team members’ roles and responsibilities. Make a chart so that everyone knows what everyone else should be doing, and communicate it inside and outside the team.
• Targets – Establish the immediate challenges and workload. Set short-term goals – then agree how they will meet these objectives and what support or information you or other members of the team can provide.
• Structures – Agree reporting structures, routines and resource requirements.
• Processes – Explain day-to-day processes, such as approaches to decision-making, problem-solving and meetings.
• Performance criteria – Explain how you will judge the team, and the performance standards involved.
• Contingency plans – Discuss what action you will take if things don’t go according to plan.

 

Team leaders rarely benefit from dictating ground rules to teams of professionals and experts, in particular – the members will just withdraw into their shells or start an open rebellion against the leader and team members as a whole. A collaborative approach in which team members share ideas and propose the ground rules increases the chance of getting buy-in.

 

Management behaviours

There is more to team effectiveness than great leadership! Without the commitment and contribution of every member, teams will never be more than a collection of individuals. The team leader’s role includes performing these tasks to involve and manage team members so that everyone can contribute their best.

• Make time for the team – Spend time with the individual members of the team to allow them to air their concerns about how the process has been handled up to now, and how things will pan out in the future.
• Value contributions – Explain why individuals’ contributions are significant, and their knowledge and expertise vital to the team’s success.
• Be open – Gather suggestions on how to make connections and establish healthy relationships.
• Mistakes happen! – Make it clear that you know mistakes happen, and those problems must be flagged up as soon as possible so that the team can resolve them.
• Involve the whole team in team plans – Work out which issues may be significant and encourage a collective plan of action from the entire team.
• Help individual members – Encourage team members to identify how they might best contribute to key areas. Help members understand more fully the different features and requirements of the business as a whole.
• Encourage team action – Explain to team members how you expect them to work together and invite suggestions on how they will achieve this. Provide opportunities for the team to share and discuss ideas.
• Tackle conflict head-on – Confront areas of conflict. In doing so, make sure everyone understands why this is important and focus on an approach that will help you resolve the issue.

 

4. Stages of group formation

“Bruce W Tuckman is a respected educational psychologist who first described the (then) four stages of group development in 1965, soon after leaving Princeton.  Looking at the behaviour of small groups in a variety of environments, he recognised the distinct phases they go through and suggested they need to experience all four stages before they achieve maximum effectiveness.  He refined and developed the model in 1977 (in conjunction with Mary Ann Jensen) with the addition of a fifth stage”.

These are the five steps that leaders have to plan for and facilitate in teams without resorting to panic:

1. Forming – the members come together with some apprehension about the objectives of the group. They are equally suspicious of team members. They take their cues initially from the team leader and rely on them to create a platform for the group to achieve the desired aims.
2. Storming – after the luke-warm welcome comes to the reckoning as the initial apprehension sets in and threatens to derail the team before it has got going. Team members struggle for dominance as the roles become clearer yet the processes and functions are still in the course of being negotiated. Group leaders can also expect a challenge to their authority at this tricky time. Ultimately, the team leader needs to keep the team focused on the team’s goals to avoid becoming distracted by relationships and emotional issues. Facilitating compromises could also be helpful at this stage.
3. Norming – this is the calm after the storm as agreement and consensus are established among team members. People become clear and committed to their roles and the team’s processes. Focus on achieving the organisation’s objectives again come to the fore as everyone now understands how they will participate in making #TeamWorkMakesTheDreamWork a reality.
4. Performing – with clarity and commitment comes facilitating the team to achieve its objectives. The implementing the team leader’s well-laid plans so that everyone is marching to the same band song. ISadly the reality is not so easy!! Managing people, processes and rules must be among the areas of focus for team leaders. These accompany attention on achieving the organisation’s objectives to ensure people are delivering the results within timescales, budget and to the required standards. It is easy even at this supposedly ‘plain-sailing’ stage for disgruntled team members who for any number of reasons abdicate, resist, withdraw or attempt to skive their way out of the roles to which they have they have committed. Groupthink is another real and present danger that team leaders must guard against.  The focus must be keeping the process to achieve the goals on track.
5. Disengagement – It matters how the work of a team comes to an end. Celebrating successes and learning from things that didn’t quite go to plan lay the groundwork for successful teamwork in future.

5. Team Development

It is important to undertake activities to help teams to work better together during the lifespan of any team. While the literature on team development focuses overly extensively on navigating the Tucker’s five stages of team formation, I have found that teams benefit from being brought together on many more occasions than that. Among the types of development activities that team leaders should consider are educational opportunities that two or more team members can attend, social events and outward bound activities – any shared activities that help team members know, build relationships and trust each other more are worthy of being termed team development and therefore worthy of spending.

 

Moving forward

Without a doubt, teams are an effective way of working due to the been numerous advantages teams have over individuals working in isolation. I hope this post has cemented what you already know from experience – that making teams work well is no easy task. Another aim of this post was to build on the Suster’s conclusions that creating the right environment is a key aspect in realising the potential of any team, regardless of whether the members are high achievers at Google or junior staff in a startup. In addition to creating a productive environment in which team members can be objective, questioning and feel listened to, every team needs a variety of roles to work well. They also must have good leadership to ensure there is a shared vision, process to work together and focus on achieving the team’s objectives. Leaders require a collaborative approach that involves the whole team in decision-making and making choices to ensure members feel engaged throughout the existence of the team.

Struggling to make your team in your small business work for you? Or maybe you are struggling to deal appropriately with interpersonal conflict among your staff? Unlike most digital marketing agencies whose abilities end at advertising, we are business development specialist with expertise in all aspects that help businesses like yours grow and sell more. So contact us today for advice and strategies that will contribute to run more efficient companies.

 

 

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