How’s Your Teaming Going ?

HOW’S YOUR TEAMING GOING? Rita McGrath / Thought Sparks

The traditional model of how teams progress goes by stages – forming, storming, norming and performing.

While it’s easy to remember, teams today don’t necessarily follow that model. They’re dispersed, virtual, temporary and potentially remote.

So how do you know if things are going well?

AS MY FRIEND JEFF PFEFFER SAYS, UNLESS YOU ARE A SOLE CONTRIBUTOR, YOUR SUCCESS DEPENDS ON OTHER PEOPLE An essential element in the success of any creative, innovative effort is to create teams of people who can cover diverse terrain, bring different skills to bear and basically work together. In my own research, I found that “deft” teams were essential to being able to create a new competitive advantage. Even though I was interested in new capability creation, I stumbled across teams. Amy Edmondson and I often joke about this – she studied teams and bumped into strategies, and I studied strategies and bumped into teams!

THE FIVE CORE CHARACTERISTICS

1

2

3

4

5

Roles

Trust

Information

Commitment

Psychological safety

ROLES

Obvious, maybe, but if you don’t have the right people in the right roles, your team will struggle.

Why does this so often happen? Basically, from a failure to structure the team in the first place.

TRUST

A big myth of teamwork is that you must like one another to trust one another. I can think of a whole lot of people who I may not be socially happy hanging out with, but whose work and capabilities I would trust immensely.

Trust is born of repeated, predictable interaction. If you do what you say you will and behave in a consistent way, that fosters trust.

INFORMATION FLOWS As teams work virtually, one very robust research conclusion is that you have to be much more deliberate about structuring the flows of information than if everyone is physically together. One of the most famous studies was done by MIT’s Thomas Allen, in which he found that if people were physically located more than 60 feet apart, they may as well have been on the other side of the country.

COMMITMENT

All the other factors aside, a huge issue with teams has to do with members’ commitment to the team’s success.

People aren’t necessarily bad people if they aren’t committed, and that’s important to realize. They may have been stuck on this team without really buying into what it is to do. They may have other priorities. It may not be in their own best interest to see this team succeed while something else doesn’t work out.

PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY This construct, first identified by Amy Edmondson and subsequently immensely popularized, refers to the ability of team members to bring up information without fear of being punished. This could be information about mistakes, about an opinion that differs from the norm or a point of view that isn’t consistent with what powerful people want to hear.

DIAGNOSIS With this short explanation behind us, I’m delighted to share that at Valize, we’ve created a free selfservice version of the survey we use to do the team assessment.

You can access it right on the Valize web site at https://www.valize.com/teameff ectivenessfreesurvey. This version lets you self-assess how a team that you’re part of is working.

MEANWHILE, A NEW COHORT OF LEARNERS IS FORMING We’re also launching a new cohort of learners for our discovery driven planning / customer insight program. The class will get going the week of September 12 and go through mid-November. I’ll be running six live one-hour sessions during the run, and you’ll have access to videos, downloads, explainers and more. We suggest you try to free demo course and if it appeals to you, come join the cohort

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