[Leadership] Chapter 8: Building and Leading High Performing Teams

Leadership Communication

Chapter 8

This chapter focuses on business leaders need to know how to build and how to manage them to achieve high performance. Most businesspeople have experienced successful as well as unsuccessful teams. Building an effective team raises both organizational and individual leadership issues. If you are thinking of forming a team for specific tasks, you first need to determine that a team is the most effective and efficient approach to perform the task, solve the problem, generate the new ideas, or generally move your company forward in some way.
Once you have told the selected team members that they are on your team, you should schedule a launch or kick-off meeting so establishing the necessary team work processes are important. Although most teams will probably want to jump right into the work without spending the necessary time on process issues, leading them through development of the purpose, goals, and approach (the commitment side of the team basics framework) will help your team work more efficiently and effectively. In this section, you will learn how to address the issues of goals, purpose, and approach in your team launch by creating a team charter, action plan, and work plan.
Teams bring together the best talent available to solve a problem; however, some times these talented people clash. Just as emotional intelligence is important for individuals, it is also important for groups. One way to improve the team’s emotional intelligence or ability to work together smoothly is for the team to take time to know something about each other’s current situation, work experiences, expectations, personality, and cultural differences. This knowledge may not result in team bonding or friendships, which are more the by product of teams than the goal, but since these softer issues influence how the person behaves as a team member, the knowledge can help the team avoid conflict and help you as the leader anticipate any problems or performance roadblocks. Although team members will get to know each other through day-to-day interactions while working together, the team members can shorten the learning curve by discussing the following information at the first team meeting:

1. Position and responsibilities
2. Team experience
3. Expectation
4. Personal
5. Cultural difference

Despite all of the best planning and time spent getting to know each other, teams will likely experience conflict. Some of it will be useful and some not, but the odds are that it will occur. As Katzenbach writes, an effective team is “about hard work, conflict, integration, and collective results.” Working on a team is not easy, but the benefits can be very rewarding for the team members, and the results can be much better for the company. Obtaining the best results can depend on the team’s ability to manage conflict. Just as individuals and teams must be able to disagree in meetings, teams need to know how to manage conflict in their overall team activities.

Types of team conflict; internal team conflict will usually be one of four types:
1. Analytical (team’s constructive disagreement over a project issue or problem)
2. Task (goal, work process, deliverables)
3. Interpersonal (personality, diversity, communication styles)
4. Roles (leadership, responsibilities, power struggles)

Approaches to handling team conflict; most teams will use one of the following three approaches to managing conflict:

1. One on one: Individuals involved work it out between themselves.
2. Facilitation: Individuals involved work with a facilitator (mediator).
3. Team: Individuals involved discuss it with the entire team.

More and more companies are using virtual teams to connect their personal in offices around the globe. Although virtual teams are common, many companies do not know to ensure that they function as effectively as a co-located team would. Virtual teams require special effort, and it should not be taken for granted that people who are effective in traditional teams will also work well in a virtual team setting. There are marked differences.

Traditional team:
• Face-to-face
• Communications primarily in person
• Limited by time and distance

Virtual team:
• Geographically dispersed
• Communicating through technology
• Unrestrained by distance and time

This chapter has discussed the best approach to ensuring all team activities run smoothly so that the team achieves its objectives. It has provided team leaders and team facilitators tools to help them build and manage a team. No doubt, leading a team and working on a team present some challenges, but with the right approach, a team can work through the challenges, achieve high performance, and, in the end, “outperform other groups and individuals.”