Whetten David A., Cameron Kim S. Developing management skills
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
BUILDING EFFECTIVE TEAMS AND TEAMWORK CHAPTER 9 517
to agree with anyone’s comments” is more effec-
tive than “You have always been a problem in
this team.”
❏ Focus feedback on sharing ideas and informa-
tion rather than giving advice. Explore alterna-
tives together. Unless requested, avoid giving
direct instructions and demands. Instead, help
recipients identify changes and improvements
themselves. For example, “How do you sug-
gest we can break this logjam and move for-
ward?” is more effective than “This is what we
must do now.”
❏ Focus feedback on the amount of information
that the recipient can use, rather than on the
amount you might like to give. Information
overload causes people to stop listening. Not
enough information leads to frustration and
misunderstanding. For example, “You seem to
have reached a conclusion before all the facts
have been presented” is more effective than
“Here are some data you should consider, and
here are some more, and here are some more,
and here are some more.”
❏ Focus feedback on the value it may have to the
receiver, not on the emotional release it pro-
vides for you. Feedback should be for the good
of the recipient, not merely for you to let off
steam. For example, “I must say that your
excessive talking is very troublesome to me and
not helpful to the group” is more effective than
“You are being a jerk and are a big cause of our
team’s difficulty in making any progress.”
❏ Focus feedback on time and place so that per-
sonal data can be shared at appropriate times.
The more specific feedback is, or the more it
can be anchored in a specific context, the more
helpful it can be. For example, “During a break
I would like to chat with you about some-
thing” is more effective than “You think your
title gives you the right to force the rest of us to
agree with you, but it’s just making us angry.”
INTERNATIONAL CAVEATS
These team member skills may require some modifica-
tion in different international settings or with teams
comprised of international members (Trompenaars &
Hampen-Turner, 1998). Whereas the team member
skills discussed above have been found to be effective
in a global context, it is naïve to expect that everyone
will react the same way to team member roles.
For example, in cultures that emphasize affectivity
(e.g., Iran, Spain, France, Italy, Mexico), personal con-
frontations and emotional displays are more acceptable
than in cultures that are more neutral (e.g., Korea,
China, Singapore, Japan), where personal references
are more offensive. Humor and displaying enthusiastic
behavior is also more acceptable in affective cultures
than neutral cultures. Similarly, status differences are
likely to play a more dominant role in ascription-
oriented cultures (e.g., Czech Republic, Egypt, Spain,
Korea), than in achievement-oriented cultures (e.g.,
United States, Norway, Canada, Australia, United
Kingdom), in which knowledge and skills tend to be
more important. Appealing to data and facts in the
latter cultures will carry more weight than in the
former cultures. Some misunderstanding may also
arise, for example, in cultures emphasizing different
time frames. Whereas some cultures emphasize just-
in-time, short-term time frames (e.g., United States),
others emphasize long-term future time frames (e.g.,
Japan). The story is told of the Japanese proposal to
purchase Yosemite National Park in California. The
first thing the Japanese submitted was a 250-year busi-
ness plan. The reaction of the California authorities
was, “Wow, that’s 1,000 quarterly reports.” The urgency
to move a team forward toward task accomplishment,
in other words, may be seen differently by different
cultural groups. Some cultures (e.g., Japan) are more
comfortable spending substantial amounts of time on
relationship-building activities before moving toward
task accomplishment.
Summary
All of us are members of multiple teams—at work, at
home, and in the community. Teams are becoming
increasingly prevalent in the workplace and in the
classroom because they have been shown to be power-
ful tools to improve the performance of individuals and
organizations. Consequently, it is important to become
proficient in leading and participating in teams. It is
obvious that merely putting people together and giving
them an assigned task does not make them into a
team. Students often complain about an excessive
amount of teamwork in business schools, but most of
it is less real teamwork than a repetitive experience of
aggregating people together and assigning them a task.
In this chapter we have reviewed three types of team
skills: diagnosing and facilitating team development,
leading a team, and being an effective team member.
Figure 9.4 illustrates the relationship of these three key
skills to high performing team performance. These
three skills are ones that you have no doubt engaged in
518 CHAPTER 9 BUILDING EFFECTIVE TEAMS AND TEAMWORK
before, but to be a skillful manager, you will need to
hone your ability to perform each of these skill activi-
ties competently.
Behavioral Guidelines
1. Learn to diagnose the stage in which your
team is operating in order to help facilitate
team development and perform your role
appropriately. Know the key characteristics of
the forming, norming, storming, and perform-
ing stages of development.
2. Provide structure and clarity in the forming
stage, support and encouragement in the
norming stage, independence and exploration
in the storming stage, and foster innovation
and positive deviance in the performing stage.
3. When leading a team, first develop credibility as a
prerequisite to having team members follow you.
Figure 9.4 Management Skills for High-Performing Teams
4. Based on your established credibility, establish
two types of goals for and with your team:
SMART goals and Everest goals.
5. As a team member, facilitate task performance
in your team by encouraging the performance of
different roles listed in Table 9.5.
6. As a team member, facilitate the development
of good relationships in your team by encour-
aging the performance of different roles listed
in Table 9.6.
7. When encountering team members who block
the team’s performance with disruptive behav-
iors, confront the behavior directly and/or iso-
late the disruptive member.
8. Provide effective feedback to unhelpful team
members that has characteristics listed in
Table 9.7.
• Desired outcomes
• Shared purpose
• Accountability
• Blurred distinctions
• Coordinated roles
• Efficiency and participation
• High quality
• Creative continuous
improvement
• Credibility and trust
• Core competence
• Develop credibility
• Articulate a vision
• Play task-facilitation roles
• Play relationship-building roles
• Provide feedback
• Diagnose stage development
• Foster team development
and high performance
Leading Teams
Team Membership
Team Development
High-Performing Teams
BUILDING EFFECTIVE TEAMS AND TEAMWORK CHAPTER 9 519
SKILL
ANALYSIS
CASES INVOLVING BUILDING
EFFECTIVE TEAMS
The Tallahassee Democrat’s ELITE Team
Katzenbach and Smith (1993, pp. 67–72), as part of their extensive research on teams,
observed the formation of a team at the Tallahassee Democrat, the only major newspaper
left in Tallahassee, Florida. Here is their description of how the team, which called itself
“ELITE Team,” performed over time. All incidents and names are factual. As you read the
description, look for evidence of team development stages.
Fred Mott, general manager of the Democrat, recognized [the declining profitability
and distribution of most major metropolitan newspapers] earlier than many of his
counterparts. In part, Mott took his lead from Jim Batten, who made “customer
obsession” the central theme of his corporate renewal effort shortly after he became
Knight-Ridder’s CEO. But the local marketplace also shaped Mott’s thinking. The
Democrat was Tallahassee’s only newspaper and made money in spite of its customer
service record. Mott believed, however, that further growth could never happen
unless the paper learned to serve customers in ways “far superior to anything else in
the marketplace.” The ELITE Team story actually began with the formation of another
team made up of Mott and his direct reports. The management group knew they
could not hope to build a “customer obsession” across the mile-high barriers isolating
production from circulation from advertising without first changing themselves. It had
become all too common, they admitted, for them to engage in “power struggles and
finger pointing.”
Using regularly scheduled Monday morning meetings, Mott’s group began to
“get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, bare their souls, and build a
level of trust.” Most important, they did so by focusing on real work they could do
together. For example, early on they agreed to create a budget for the paper as a
team instead of singly as function heads.
Over time, the change in behavior at the top began to be noticed. One of the
women who later joined the ELITE Team, for example, observed that the sight of
senior management holding their “Monday morning come-to-Jesus” meetings really
made a difference to her and others. “I saw all this going on and I thought, ‘What are
they so happy about?’”
Eventually, as the team at the top got stronger and more confident, they forged
a higher aspiration: to build customer focus and break down the barriers across the
broad base of the paper....
A year after setting up the new [team], however, Mott was both frustrated and
impatient. Neither the Advertising Customer Service department, a series of cus-
tomer surveys, additional resources thrown against the problem in the interim, nor
any number of top management exhortations had made any difference. Ad errors
persisted, and sales reps still complained of insufficient time with customers. In fact,
the new unit had turned into another organizational barrier.
Customer surveys showed that too many advertisers still found the Democrat
unresponsive to their needs and too concerned with internal procedures and dead-
lines. People at the paper also had evidence beyond surveys. In one instance, for
520 CHAPTER 9 BUILDING EFFECTIVE TEAMS AND TEAMWORK
example, a sloppily prepared ad arrived through a fax machine looking like a “rat had
run across the page.” Yet the ad passed through the hands of seven employees and
probably would have found its way into print if it had not been literally unreadable!
As someone commented, “It was not anyone’s job to make sure it was right. If they
felt it was simply their job to type or paste it up, they just passed it along.” This par-
ticular fax, affectionately know as the “rat tracks fax,” came to symbolize the essen-
tial challenge at the Democrat. . . .
At the time, Mott was reading about Motorola’s quality programs and the goal of
zero defects. He decided to heed Dunlap’s advice by creating a special team of work-
ers charged with eliminating all errors in advertisements. Mott now admits he was
skeptical that frontline people could become as cohesive a team as he and his direct
reports. So he made Dunlap, his trusted confidante, the leader of the team that took
on the name ELITE for “ELIminate The Errors.”
A year later, Mott was a born-again believer in teams. Under ELITE’s leadership,
advertising accuracy, never before tracked at the paper, had risen sharply and stayed
above 99 percent. Lost revenues from errors, previously as high as $10,000 a month,
had dropped to near zero. Ad sales reps had complete confidence in the Advertising
Customer Service department’s capacity and desire to treat each ad as though the
Democrat‘s existence were at stake. And surveys showed a huge positive swing in
advertiser satisfaction. Mott considered all of this nothing less than a minor miracle.
The impact of ELITE, however, went beyond numbers. It completely redesigned
the process by which the Democrat sells, creates, produces, and bills for advertise-
ments. More important yet, it stimulated and nurtured the customer obsession and
cross-functional cooperation required to make the new process work. In effect, this
team of mostly frontline workers transformed an entire organization with respect to
customer service.
ELITE had a lot going for it from the beginning. Mott gave the group a clear per-
formance goal (eliminate errors) and a strong mix of skills (12 of the best people
from all parts of the paper). He committed himself to follow through by promising, at
the first meeting, that “whatever solution you come up with will be implemented.” In
addition, Jim Batten’s customer obsession movement helped energize the task force.
But it took more than a good sendoff and an overarching corporate theme to
make ELITE into a high-performance team. In this case, the personal commitments
began to grow, unexpectedly, over the early months as the team grappled with its
challenge. At first, the group spent more time pointing fingers at one another than
coming to grips with advertising errors. Only when one of them produced the famous
“rat tracks fax” and told the story behind it did the group start to admit that
everyone—not everyone else—was at fault. Then, recalls one member, “We had some
pretty hard discussions. And there were tears in those meetings.”
The emotional response galvanized the group to the task at hand and to one
another. And the closer it got, the more focused it became on the challenge. ELITE
decided to look carefully at the entire process by which an ad was sold, created, printed,
and billed. When it did, the team discovered patterns in the errors, most of which could
be attributed to time pressures, bad communication, and poor attitude....
Commitment to one another drove ELITE to expand its aspirations continually.
Having started with the charge to eliminate errors, ELITE moved on to break down
functional barriers, then to redesigning the entire advertising process, then to refin-
ing new standards and measures for customer service, and, finally, to spreading its
own brand of “customer obsession” across the entire Democrat....Inspired by
ELITE, for example, one production crew started coming to work at 4
A.M. to ease
time pressures later in the day....
BUILDING EFFECTIVE TEAMS AND TEAMWORK CHAPTER 9 521
To this day, the spirit of ELITE lives on at the Democrat. “There is no beginning and
no end,” says Dunlap. “Every day we experience something we learn from.” ELITE’s spirit
made everyone a winner—the customers, the employees, management, and even
Knight-Ridder’s corporate leaders. CEO Jim Batten was so impressed that he agreed to
pay for managers from other Knight-Ridder papers to visit the Democrat to learn from
ELITE’s experience. And, of course, the 12 people who committed themselves to one
another and their paper had an impact and an experience none of them will ever forget.
SOURCE: The Tallahassee Democrat’s Elite Team Katzenbach, Jon R. and Douglas K. Smith
(1993) The Wisdom of Teams. Harvard Business School Press, pages 67–72.
Discussion Questions
1. What were the stages of development of the ELITE Team? Identify specific
examples of each of the four stages of team development in the case.
2. How do you explain the team’s reaching a high-performance condition? What were
the major predictive factors?
3. Why didn’t Mott’s top management team reach a high level of performance? What
was his team lacking? Why was an ELITE team needed?
4. Make recommendations about what Mott should do now to capitalize on the ELITE
Team experience. If you were to become a consultant to the Tallahassee Democrat,
what advice would you give Mott about how he can capitalize on team building?
The Cash Register Incident
Read the following scenario by yourself. Then complete a three-step exercise, the first
two steps by yourself, and the third step with a team. A time limit is associated with
each step.
A store owner had just turned off the lights in the store when a man appeared and
demanded money. The owner opened a cash register. The contents of the cash register were
scooped up, and the man sped away. A member of the police force was notified promptly.
Step 1: After reading these instructions, close your book. Without looking at the
scenario, rewrite it as accurately as you can. Describe the incident as best you can
using your own words.
Step 2: Assume that you observed the incident described in the paragraph above.
Later, a reporter asks you questions about what you read in order to write an article
for the local newspaper. Answer the questions from the reporter by yourself. Do not
talk with anyone else about your answers. Put a Y, N, or DK in the response column.
Since reporters are always pressed for time, take no more than two minutes to com-
plete step 2.
Answer
Y Yes, or true
N No, or false
DK Don’t know, or there is no way to tell
Step 3: The reporter wants to interview your entire team together. As a team, discuss
the answers to each question and reach a consensus decision—that is, one with which
everyone on the team agrees. Do not vote or engage in horse-trading. The reporter
wants to know what you all agree upon. Complete your team discussion in 10 minutes.
522 CHAPTER 9 BUILDING EFFECTIVE TEAMS AND TEAMWORK
Statements About the Incident
“As a reporter, I am interested in what happened in this incident. Can you tell me
what occurred? I’d like you to address the following eleven questions.”
Statement
Alone Team
1. Did a man appear after the owner turned off his store
lights?
2. Was the robber a man?
3. Is it true that the man did not demand money?
4. The man who opened the cash register was the owner,
right?
5. Did the store owner scoop up the contents of the cash
register?
6. OK, so someone opened the cash register, right?
7. Let me get this straight, after the man who demanded
the money scooped up the contents of the cash register,
he ran away?
8. The contents of the cash register contained money, but
you don’t know how much?
9. Did the robber demand money of the owner?
10. OK, by way of summary, the incident concerns a series
of events in which only three persons are involved: the
owner of the store, a man who demanded money, and a
member of the police force?
11. Let me be sure I understand. Is it true that the following
events occurred: Someone demanded money, the cash
register was opened, its contents were scooped up, and a
man dashed out of the store?
When you have finished your team decision making and mock interview with the
reporter, the instructor will provide correct answers. Calculate how many answers
you got right as an individual, and then calculate how many right answers your team
achieved. Also go back and compare your own description of the incident with the
actual wording of the scenario. How did you do? How accurate were you in your
description?
Discussion Questions
1. How many individuals did better than the team as a whole? (In general, more than
80 percent of people do worse than the team.)
2. What changes would be needed in order for your team score to be even better?
3. How do you explain the superior performance of most teams over even the best
individuals?
4. Under what conditions would individuals do better than teams in making decisions?
BUILDING EFFECTIVE TEAMS AND TEAMWORK CHAPTER 9 523
SKILL
PRACTICE
EXERCISES IN BUILDING EFFECTIVE TEAMS
Team Diagnosis and Team Development Exercise
In order to help you develop the ability to diagnose team stage development, consider a
team in which you are now a member. If you belong to a team as part of this class, select
that one. You may also select a team at your employment, in your church or community,
or a team in another class in school. Complete the following three-step exercise:
Step 1: Use the following questions to help you determine the stage of development in
which your team is operating. Create a score for your team for each stage of development.
Identify the stage in which the team seems to operate the most.
Step 2: Identify what actions or interventions would lead your team to the next higher
stage of development. Specify what dynamics need to change, what team members need
to do, and/or how the team leader could foster more advanced team development.
Step 3: Share your scores and your suggestions with others in class in a small-group set-
ting, and add at least one good idea from someone else’s diagnosis to your own design.
Use the following scale in your rating of your team right now.
Rating Scale
1 Not typical at all of my team
2 Not very typical of my team
3 Somewhat typical of my team
4 Very typical of my team
Stage 1
1. Not everyone is clear about the objectives and goals of the team.
2. Not everyone is personally acquainted with everyone else in the team.
3. Only a few team members actively participate.
4. Interactions among team members are very safe or somewhat
superficial.
5. Trust among all team members has not yet been established.
6. Many team members seem to need direction from the leader in
order to participate.
Stage 2
7. All team members know and agree with the objectives and goals of
the team.
8. Team members all know one another.
9. Team members are very cooperative and actively participate in the
activities of the team.
10. Interactions among team members are friendly, personal, and
nonsuperficial.
524 CHAPTER 9 BUILDING EFFECTIVE TEAMS AND TEAMWORK
11. A comfortable level of trust has been established among team members.
12. A strong unity exists in the team, and team members feel very much
a part of a special group.
Stage 3
13. Disagreements and differing points of view are openly expressed by
team members.
14. Competition exists among some team members.
15. Some team members do not follow the rules or the team norms.
16. Subgroups or coalitions exist within the team.
17. Some issues create major disagreements when discussed by the
team, with some members on one side and others on the other side.
18. The authority or competence of the team leader is being questioned
or challenged.
Stage 4
19. Team members are committed to the team and actively cooperate to
improve the team’s performance.
20. Team members feel free to try out new ideas, experiment, share
something crazy, or do novel things.
21. A high level of energy is displayed by team members and expecta-
tions for performance are very high.
22. Team members do not always agree, but a high level of trust exists
and each person is given respect, so disagreements are resolved
productively.
23. Team members are committed to helping one another succeed and
improve, so self-aggrandizement is at a minimum.
24. The team can make fast decisions without sacrificing quality.
Scoring
Add up the scores for the items in each stage of team development. Generally, one stage
clearly stands out as having the highest scores. Team stages develop sequentially, so the
highest stage in which scores occur is usually the dominant stage of development. Based
on these scores, identify ways to move the team to the next level.
Total of Stage 1 items
Total of Stage 2 items
Total of Stage 3 items
Total of Stage 4 items
Winning the War on Talent
In this exercise, you will form teams of six members. Your team will have an overall objec-
tive to achieve, and each team member will have individual objectives. The exercise is
accomplished in seven steps and it should take a total of 50 minutes to complete steps 1
through 6.
Step 1: In your team, read the scenario on the next page about the problem of attracting
and retaining talented employees in twenty-first century organizations. Your team
objective is to generate two innovative but workable ideas for how to retain good teachers
in the public school system. You will have 15 minutes to develop the ideas.
Step 2: When each team has completed the assignment, each is given two minutes to
present the two ideas. These ideas will be evaluated, and a winning team will be selected
based on the following criteria:
❏ The ideas are workable and affordable.
❏ The ideas are interesting, innovative, and unusual.
❏ The ideas have a good chance of making a difference if they are implemented.
Step 3: In addition to the team assignment, each team member is assigned to play three
team member roles during the discussion. A role assignment schedule is listed below.
Team members may select the roles they wish to play, or an instructor can assign the roles.
One purpose of this individual assignment is to give team members practice in playing
either task-facilitation roles or relationship-building roles in a team setting, so you should
take these assignments seriously. Remember, however, that you have only 15 minutes.
When your team has completed its task, each team member will rate the effectiveness of
every other team member in how well they played their roles and how much they helped
the team accomplish its task. You will have five minutes to complete the ratings.
T
EAM PERFORMANCE RATING
MEMBER (1) LOW–(10) HIGH
NAME ROLES PERFORMANCE FEEDBACK
1 Direction giving
Urging
Enforcing
2 Information seeking
Information giving
Elaborating
3 Monitoring
Reality testing
Summarizing
4 Process analyzing
Supporting
Confronting
5 Harmonizing
Tension relieving
Energizing
6 Developing
Consensus building
Empathizing
BUILDING EFFECTIVE TEAMS AND TEAMWORK CHAPTER 9 525
526 CHAPTER 9 BUILDING EFFECTIVE TEAMS AND TEAMWORK
Step 4: Each team member uses the form above to rate the performance of, and
provide feedback to, every other member of the team. In completing the form, make
sure you focus on how well each person performed his or her assigned roles. Identify at
least one thing you noticed about the performance of each team member so that you
can provide personal feedback to each one. Remember that the overall purpose of this
exercise is to give you practice in playing effective roles in teams and providing feedback
to team members. You are given five minutes for this rating task.
Step 5: When each team has completed its task, one representative from each team is
selected to form a judging team. This judging team evaluates the quality of the ideas
produced by each team. A winning team is announced as a result of their deliberations.
(Other class members will want to observe and rate the performance of this judging
team and its members as they make their selection.) The judging team will be given
10 minutes to select the winning team.
Step 6: Teams meet again so that personal feedback can be given. Each team member
takes a total of three minutes to give feedback to the other members of his or her team
based on the evaluation form above. A total of 20 minutes will be required to provide
this feedback.
Step 7: Hold a class discussion about what you observed regarding team members’ roles.
Especially, reflect on your own experience trying to play those roles and what seemed to be
most effective in facilitating task accomplishment and in building team cohesion.
The Problem Scenario
Almost to a person, the chief concern expressed by senior executives in most “old econ-
omy” firms is how to attract and retain managerial talent. With the economy expected
to grow at almost three times the growth of the job market, finding competent employ-
ees will be a continuing challenge for the next several years. The allure of dot.com
firms, high-growth companies, and high-risk–high-return ventures has created an
incredibly difficult environment for organizations whose chief competitive advantage is
intellectual capital and human talent. Headhunters, venture capitalists, and even firms’
customers are aggressively trying to lure away management talent any way they can. A
recent survey of Wall Street investment bankers revealed that more than half had been
approached by an Internet company. Armed with venture capital dollars and business
plans promising swift public offerings, it is easy to see why many are succeeding in
attracting managerial talent away from traditional companies. Compensation packages
in the seven figures are not unusual.
In this highly competitive environment where intellectual capital is at a premium,
consider the difficulty faced by not-for-profit organizations, local or state governments,
arts organizations, or educational institutions whose budgets are constrained far below
the high-priced world of the “new economy.” How will they compete for talent when
they cannot come close to the salaries of firms whose market capitalization exceeds the
GDP of many African countries?
In particular, the U.S. public education system has suffered tremendously in this
environment. Currently the United States spends more per child than any other coun-
try, and the costs of education are increasing far faster than the consumer price index.
However, it is well known that more than a quarter of public school students drop out
before high school graduation, and of those who remain, the percent passing proficiency
exams is woefully low—in some school districts, less than 10 percent. The average
tenure of public school teachers is less than seven years, and that number is dropping
rapidly as these knowledge workers can find positions elsewhere at triple and quadruple
their school salaries. Add to that the difficulties escalating in the classroom resulting