How many of us have participated in a truly highly effective team? Although most of us accept that in today’s work environment, teams produce better solutions and results for the complex problems facing organizations today than individuals working alone, very few of us have actually worked in truly effective teams. I believe this is because organizational leaders are still often reluctant to make the organizational changes necessary for groups to become truly effective teams.

Due to the widespread use of teams in today’s business world, it’s important to ask how to make them more effective. Richard Hackman, the author of Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances, suggests “a three-dimensional conception of team effectiveness” (Hackman, 2002, p. 213). According to this concept, teams “produce products, services, or decisions that are fully acceptable to” their customers (p. 213); they experience a “growth in team capacity” (p. 30); and team members find the “group experience meaningful and satisfying” (p. 30). In the process, members of teams that meet these three criteria go from simply being a group of people working together to becoming a “real team” in the process (p. 41). Royal teams have four characteristics, which include; “a team task, clear boundaries, clearly specified authority to manage their own work process, and stability of members for a reasonable period of time” (p. 41). Real teams can be traditional departmental silos, cross-functional, or, as is becoming increasingly common in the global economy, virtual in nature.

I have participated in many different groups and teams in my career, whether as a team member, team leader, or team facilitator. In my experience, the more traditional “functional teams…composed of a boss and his or her direct reports” are much less effective than cross-functional teams (Parker, 2003, p. 2). Functional teams are actually more of a group of individuals than actual teams because, while they work together to solve common problems in order to achieve organizational goals, they are generally made up of individuals who lack specific authority to organize and manage their work. and they do not share a unified goal. Rather, each individual works to achieve their own goals within the boundaries set by the larger organization and only come together because of a common geography or reporting structure within the organization, not because they have common goals or because they have authority to do it. organize your work or implement your results. Even the attempts I’ve been involved in to organize sales professionals visiting the same customer are often just groups coming together to coordinate individual activities, not true teams. It seems that few organizations are willing to take the step of giving these groups the authority to organize their own work, and even fewer are rewarded as a team rather than as individuals.

The most effective teams I have been a member of, led, or facilitated were more cross-functional in nature. These teams were organized with a specific goal or objective to complete, given a timeframe to accomplish that task, and the authority to organize their work process and make decisions that would then be accepted by organizational leadership. Additionally, team members were chosen based on their different individual skills and areas of expertise that would complement or add to the skills of other team members. These teams were more effective than other groups despite the fact that much of their work was done virtually due to the global nature of the problems they tackled. This is not to say that these teams did not wrestle with similar problems, such as how to make decisions, overcome conflicts and organize workloads, etc., that other groups must overcome, however; the common goal, the authority given to them and the limited time motivated them to overcome their differences and find a suitable solution. These teams could have been even more effective if more formal training had been given to the team to help them establish communication norms such as how to make decisions and how to manage conflict effectively, adapt to the individual styles of team members, etc They could also become more effective if organizational leadership made the decision to reward and/or recognize the team together as a unit and not as individual contributors.

For groups to become truly effective teams, I believe organizational leaders can take six important steps, including:

1) Organize cross-functional teams based on the different and specific skills and abilities of each member

2) Set clear goals and boundaries for the team.

3) Give your teams clear authority and autonomy to organize their work and achieve their goals.

4) Set a realistic but defined time frame to achieve your goal in order to motivate and lead the team to results.

5) Support your teams by providing all the necessary resources to achieve their goals, including; training, budget and organizational access necessary for the team to achieve its objective.

6) Reward and recognize the team as a whole and not as individuals.

References:

Hackman, J. Richard, (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Parker, Glenn M., (2003). Cross-functional teams: working with allies, enemies, and other strangers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.