FOCUS SUPERPOWER TEAMS
most teams are mediocre, not great. We muddle through with adequate processes, and we get decent results – not great ones. Today, teams have to perform at their very best, sustaining and even increasing their performance while connecting their members in positive relationships, with each other and with the firm. They need to be Superpower Teams. The lessons learned during the pandemic challenge some of our fundamental assumptions about teams in general, and point to new approaches for Superpower Teams.
What you’ve learned from virtual teams
What we now know The pandemic has shown us everything we need to know about creating winning teams Writing Martha Maznevski
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rganizations demand more and more from their teams – and so they should. The business environment is changing faster than ever, customers are more demanding, and supply chains are reconfiguring. Today’s organizations face new heights of both possibilities and constraints. Organizations need to be responsive and flexible, while providing stability for both trust and efficiency. Organizational structures, no matter how sophisticated, can’t address all these demands simultaneously. Teams can. Unfortunately, they don’t always live up to their potential. Humans have worked in teams for thousands of years, but
Most leaders have learned a lot about teams during the pandemic
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Most leaders have learned a lot about teams during the pandemic. Most importantly, we saw that virtual teams can perform really well – indeed, some worked better virtually. Researchers have known about this for years, but for many people it has been difficult to accept. Plus, it was hard to force ourselves to try a virtual set-up when we didn’t need it. For virtual team-working, there are some critical things to get right. The research summarizes them in three categories: heartbeats, disciplined technology, and shared leadership. The heartbeat is about keeping a team’s blood and oxygen – the relationships and knowledge – flowing. This is extremely difficult to do virtually. Teams that worked in-person pre-pandemic could at least build on what they had before – but if you formed a new team or welcomed new members while working virtually, you had to pay close attention to building relationships and sharing the nuanced knowledge that can’t be found in the manuals. To do this well took a lot of time, but it will have paid off. The best virtual teams schedule heartbeat meetings on a regular basis. Whether daily, weekly or monthly, the regularity is vital. Just as important is the agenda. If you’re simply walking through reports that could be read independently, the heartbeat won’t provide much blood or oxygen. Use shared time to check in with each other personally, and to focus on a few tough problems that require multiple perspectives. This builds trust and shares the knowledge needed to carry the team between heartbeats. The second thing to get right is disciplined technology. You probably gained a new appreciation for your team’s workflow platform, be it a comprehensive application like Microsoft Teams, or a combination of tools. Your team members had to agree on what to put where, how to keep in touch, and who was doing what. They learned to be flexible with technology and to jump