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In the early eighties of the last century, Bill Greenwood and a small group of disgruntled employees of the railway company Burlington Northern have gone contrary to the main part of the top management and created a multi-billion dollar business piggyback 1 rail transportation. They did so despite massive opposition from within the company, which sometimes turned into resentment. Hewlett-Packard's Medical Products Group owes its outstanding success primarily to the significant efforts of Dean Morton, Lew Platt, Ben Holmes, Dick Alberding, and several of their colleagues who have revived a healthcare business that almost everyone has written off. Jim Batten of Knight Ridder has so engraved his “customer centricity” vision in the minds of the Tallahassee Democrat that 14 employees enthusiastically turned correcting carding into a huge revolutionary process and ignited the entire editorial staff with their passion.
These are the stories that happen in the carding of teams. Here we are talking about real teams doing productive activities, not about amorphous groups, which are only called teams because this word is believed to motivate carders and give them energy. The difference between teams that deliver results and all other groups is an issue that most of us pay very little attention to. Part of the problem is that behind the word “team” is a concept that everyone is familiar with (see the appendix “Not All Groups Are Commands: How To Find The Difference”).
The idea at a glance
The word "team" is pronounced so often that many leaders forget about its true meaning and its real power. In an unremarkable carding group, productivity is the sum of what its members do on their own. On the contrary, team productivity is the result of the efforts of both its individual members and the entire team.
Mutual responsibility can bring tremendous results, even though it seems obvious. It enables the team to achieve levels of productivity that far exceed the maximum capabilities of individual members. To do this, employees must do more than just listen to colleagues, respond constructively to other carder's words, and provide support to each other. In addition to these team values, team members must share the required discipline.
At least that's what we thought when we started our research for The Wisdom of Teams. We wanted to know how teams with different performance levels differ, where and which teams perform better, and what senior management can do to improve their effectiveness. We spoke with hundreds of carders from over 50 different teams from 30 organizations.
We found that there is a discipline frame carding that makes teams carding. We also learned that a team and good performance are inseparable: you can't have just one without the other. But carders use the word "team" so haphazardly that it interferes with learning and applying the discipline that leads to good performance. In order to make the right decisions about how and when to reward and use teams, and whether to do so at all, it is important for leaders to have a more accurate understanding of what is a team and what is not.
Most executives advocate team carding, and they are right. Teamcarding contains a set of values that encourage listening and responding constructively to other carder's opinions, providing support for each other, giving colleagues the opportunity to doubt and acknowledge their interests and achievements.
An idea in practice
The core team discipline includes five characteristics.
These values help the team achieve good performance, as well as improve the performance of its individual members and the organization as a whole. But team carding values are not unique to teams and are not sufficient to support team performance (see the Building Teamcarding sidebar).
Not every carding collective is a team. Committees, boards, and focus groups do not necessarily become teams. Groups don't turn into teams just because someone calls them that. The entire staff of a large and complex organization will never be a team - but remember how often this common phrase is pronounced!
To understand how teams achieve increased productivity, we must distinguish between teams and other types of carding groups. This difference leads to a difference in performance. A carding group's productivity is the sum of what its members do as individuals. Team performance includes both individual results and what we call the product of collective action. This is something that two (or more) team members should do together, such as an interview, analysis, or experiment. Whatever the product of teamcarding is, it reflects the connection, the real contribution of the team members.
Carding groups are most common and most effective in large organizations where individual responsibility is especially important. The very best teams come together to share information, plans, and insights and increase individual productivity levels.
The focus of the carding group is always on individual goals and on the responsibilities of individuals. Its members are responsible only for their own result. They are not trying to achieve additional productivity gains that require two or more carders to carding together.
Teams are fundamentally different from carding groups because they assume both individual and mutual responsibility. Teams not only rely on group discussions, disputes and solutions, they not only rely on information available to all members and best practices to improve productivity. They create a product with the common input of all their members. This is what makes it possible to achieve a level of performance that is higher than the sum of the best individual performance of the team members. Simply put, a team is more than just the sum of its parts.
The first step to a discipline-building approach is to start thinking of each team as a separate unit of productivity, not just a collection of useful resources. After examining the ratings of existing teams - both successful and failing - we suggest the following. Take this as a carding definition of a real team, or better yet, as its fundamental order: a team is a small number of carders with complementary skills, united by a common goal, a set of common operational objectives and the same approach, as well as mutual responsibility for what are they doing.
The essence of a team is shared interest. Without it, groups carding as individuals, and with it they become a powerful unit of collective productivity. This commitment requires a goal that team members can believe in. If the goal of an organization is “to make our suppliers fully satisfy customers,” “to make our company rightfully proud,” or “to prove that all children can learn,” then credible team goals should contain an element of with victory, primacy, revolutionary change or innovation.
By carding to form a meaningful goal, teams gain a sense of direction, momentum, and commitment. Nevertheless, the formation of the team's involvement and its interest in the goal is quite possible even in the case when the initial direction is set from the outside. It is often assumed that the team will not begin to perceive the goal as their own until the bosses leave them alone, but in fact this often confuses potential teams rather than helps them. In reality, goals that are independently developed in a team are extremely rare - for example, they are found in entrepreneurial activity.
Most successful teams form their goals in response to demands or plans, which are usually set by senior management. In general, it helps teams define the results the company expects of them. Top management is responsible for clarifying the carding conditions, for the rationale and for the formulation of production problems, but managers must leave some room for maneuver so that the team can develop interest in their own interpretation of the common goal, define special tasks and timelines for themselves, your approach to business.
We build team activities
While no one can give an exact recipe for how to build a good performing team, let's take a look at a few of the approaches taken by many successful teams.
Define the urgency of the carding, set the performance indicators and the goal. All employees need to trust that the team is doing urgent and important carding. They also want to know what is expected of them. In fact, if the job has a strong case and needs to be done urgently, then the team is likely to reach its full potential, as happened with one customer service group. Members were told that further growth for the entire company would not be possible without significant improvements in their operations. Teams perform best in a competitive environment. This is why in companies where productivity is highly valued, teams are usually eagerly formed.
Choose team members for the skills they have and can acquire, not for their personality. No team succeeds if members do not have the skills to meet their goals and objectives. Nevertheless, in many teams it becomes clear which skills will be needed only after the formation of the team. A smart leader will select carders for the skills they possess and take into account their ability to improve existing skills and acquire new ones.
Pay close attention to the first meeting with the team and your actions. First impressions always mean a lot. When potential coworkers first get together, everyone carefully monitors the signals from those around them in order to confirm or refute their assumptions and doubts. Particularly pay attention to the leaders: to the future leader and managers who organize the team, look after it or in some other way influence it. And always what the leaders do turns out to be much more important than what they say. If a top manager, disregarding the opinion of the audience, goes out to call 10 minutes after the start of the meeting and does not return, carders understand what he wanted to tell them.
Establish some clear rules of conduct. All effective teams first and foremost develop some principles that help them achieve their goals and the best performance indicators. The most important rules regulate group behavior (for example, “no one should interrupt the conversation to make a phone call”), discussions (“no sacred cows”), confidentiality (“outside this room you can only talk about what we came to an agreement "), an analytical approach (" you can always identify favorable facts "), result orientation ("everyone takes on obligations and fulfills them"), constructiveness of disputes (" no "finger pointing" ") and, what is the most importantly, the contribution of each team member ("everyone is doing real carding"). Set several urgent tasks and performance-oriented goals, and stick to them. Effective teams detect their progress by performing key performance-oriented activities. Such actions can begin when several difficult goals have been set at once, which need to be achieved quickly. No real team exists without the results of its activities, so the sooner these results appear, the faster the team will pull together.
Challenge the team regularly with the latest information. The new information encourages the team to revise and enrich their understanding of what they are facing in their activities. Thus, it helps the team to form a common goal, set more clear objectives and improve the overall approach. For example, one product improvement team at a factory learned about the high cost of bad goods only after employees examined various types of defective items and tagged each with a price tag; after that it was already clear where to move on. Conversely, teams make mistakes when they assume that all the information they need is in the collective experience and knowledge of their members.
Spend a lot of time together. Common sense dictates to us that team members should be side by side for a long time, both on schedule and outside of carding, especially when the team is just formed. Indeed, creative insights and strengthening personal connections require unplanned and impromptu interactions as much as careful analysis of spreadsheets and customer interviews. Busy executives and managers very often deliberately reduce the time they spend together. The successful teams we studied gave themselves time to learn how to be a team. It is not necessary to be physically close all the time; communication using electronic means of communication, fax and telephone is also quite suitable.
Harness the power of positive feedback, recognition, and rewards. Positive reinforcement carding as well in a team setting as it does in any other setting. Distributing Gold Stars helps to shape new behaviors that are critical to team performance. If carders are wary, for example, by their shy colleague's first attempts at voice and input, they can provide honest, positive reinforcement that will increase the person’s desire to participate in the community’s activities. Beyond bonuses, there are many ways to celebrate successes and motivate a team, from a senior executive talking to a subordinate about the urgency of their carding to using non-monetary prizes. However, the most coveted reward is usually the satisfaction of one's own accomplishments, shared by all team members.
The best teams devote a lot of time and effort to finding, forming and agreeing on a goal that belongs simultaneously to the entire team and to each of its members. This continues for as long as the team has existed. In contrast, doomed groups rarely develop a common goal. For a variety of reasons - such as lack of focus on their performance, lack of resources, or poor leadership - they don't rally around a motivating goal.
In addition, the best teams transform the overall goal into separate objectives of their activities, for example, reducing the scrap rate of suppliers by 50% or increasing the math scores of graduates from 40 to 95%. Moreover, if the team fails to form such tasks, or if they are not directly related to a common goal, then employees begin to get confused, the group falls apart and its performance does not rise above average. On the contrary, if the goal and objectives of the activity are built on each other and are combined with a common interest in the business, then the team becomes a powerful production unit.
Transforming more general guidelines into specific, meaningful tasks for the team is, of course, the first step towards creating an important goal for its members. Special challenges - for example, launching a product to market twice as fast as usual, responding to customer requests 24 hours a day, or achieving zero scrap while reducing production costs by 40% - become a solid support for the team. This happens for several reasons.
Almost all effective teams that we have seen, heard about or carding on ourselves, had from 2 to 25 members. For example, the team from Burlington Northern, which set up a piggyback business, has seven carders. The Knight Ridder publishing team has 14 members. Most successful teams have less than 10 members. It cannot be admitted that a small team size is a much more practical indicator than success always and in everything. In theory, a large group, say fifty carders, can become a team. But it is more likely to break down into smaller “teams within a team” rather than function as a coherent whole.
Why? It is difficult for a large number of carders to constructively interact with each other as a single team; they do much less real carding together. It is much more likely that 10, rather than 50, carders will overcome their individual, functional and hierarchical differences, become one and take collective responsibility for the results.
In addition, large groups face logistical challenges such as finding physical space and meeting time. They also have to deal with more complex obstacles, such as herd instinct or crowd psychology, that prevent the intensive exchange of views necessary to build a team. As a result, when large groups try to carding out a common goal, they only get untenable "missions" and general intentions that cannot be turned into anything concrete. Such groups tend to quickly reach the stage where meetings become boring routines - a clear sign that most carders in the group do not know exactly why they came here, other than some intention to do better. Anyone who has come across this at least once understands how annoying it is.
In addition to the fact that the size of the team should not exceed the recommended size, it is important to have the right mix of skills - that is, the employees together should have all the skills necessary to carry out the carding ahead. It seems obvious, but usually it is not possible to achieve this in potential teams. Skill requirements can be divided into three fairly understandable categories.
Professional competence
A group of doctors is unlikely to pursue employment discrimination in court. However, teams of doctors and lawyers are often involved in medical malpractice or personal injury cases. Likewise, teams that develop new products that include only marketers or engineers are less likely to be successful than those where both professions complement each other.
Problem solving and decision making skills
Teams must be able to recognize the challenges and opportunities that come along the way, assess the chances of moving forward, and then make the necessary concessions and decide to move on. Most teams need members with these skills from the start, although many develop them best on the job.
Interpersonal skills
General understanding and a common goal for all cannot appear without effective team interaction and constructive conflicts in it, which, in turn, depends on interpersonal skills. They include the ability to take risks, healthy criticism, objectivity, the ability to actively listen and give others the right to doubt, respect for others' interests and achievements.
Obviously, no team can come into existence without some minimum skill set of its members. This is especially true for professional skills. However, remember how often you have had to carding in a team whose members only got into it because of personal relationships or their place in the organization. In such cases, no one thinks about the ability of team members to somehow combine.
At the other extreme, when selecting carders for a team, skills are given too much importance. However, all of the successful teams we've come across lacked the full skill set in the beginning. The Burlington Northern team, for example, initially lacked a qualified marketer, even though the operational challenges were market-related. In fact, we are learning that teams are a powerful mechanism for developing the skills needed to cope with the difficult challenges that stand in the way. Accordingly, the choice of team members should be related to both existing skills and the ability to learn something new.
Effective teams develop a strong interest in a common approach, that is, in how to carding together to achieve a goal. Employees must agree on who to entrust the carding, how the schedule will be drawn up and maintained, what skills need to be developed, how long-term team memberships can be earned, and how decisions should be made and changed collectively. This commitment is just as important to the performance of the team as the commitment of its members to their own goals and objectives.
Agreement on the specifics of the job and how to carding together to combine the skills of all members and improve collective performance is central to shaping a common approach. There is probably no need to prove the detriment of a situation where all the real carding is shifted to a few team members (or to those whom others consider to be losers) and only meetings and control activities remain joint - this approach cannot strengthen the real team. All members of a successful team do an equal amount of carding, everyone, including the leader, makes a concrete contribution to the creation of the product. This principle is emotionally very important and affects the overall performance.
When carders join a team, especially if it was created for business reasons, each of them already has some kind of carding assignments, and also has some strengths and weaknesses, reflecting a wide variety of abilities, backgrounds, character traits and prejudices. The team will be able to develop and come to an agreement on the best way to solve their problems only after carders open up to each other and decide together how to apply total human resources to a common goal. At the heart of this long and sometimes difficult interaction is the division of roles, where the team honestly reviews which members are best suited for each assignment and how the individual areas of carding and the carders assigned to them fit together. Basically, the team members enter into a social contract with each other,
No group will become a team until they accept shared responsibility. Like a shared goal and approach, shared responsibility is an ordeal. Just think of a small but very important difference, say, between the phrases "the boss made me responsible" or "we think we are responsible." The first position can lead to the second, but without the second command, there will be no.
Companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Motorola have a deeply ingrained carding ethic that teaches teams naturally when there is a clear carding task that requires a team effort rather than an individual effort. In such companies, the factor of mutual responsibility is a matter of course. “We are all in the same boat” - this is the slogan under which they achieve high performance.
At its core, team responsibility is about the sincere promises we make to ourselves and others, the promises that underpin the two critical characteristics of effective teams - commitment and trust. Most of us are wary of situations where we are going to be part of a potential team, because deep-rooted individualism and previous experience discourage us from entrusting our fate to the hands of other carders or taking responsibility for them. Teams don't succeed if they don't pay attention to this behavior or hope that things will carding out by themselves.
Mutual responsibility cannot be forced, just as carders cannot be forced to trust each other. But when the team shares common goals, objectives and approach to their solution, mutual responsibility complements them in a completely natural way. Responsibility grows out of the time, energy and action invested in understanding what the team is trying to achieve and how best to do it. At the same time, responsibility supports all the efforts of the team members.
When carders carding together to achieve a common goal, trust and interest will surely come. Consequently, teams with a strong common goal and common approach will inevitably acquire responsibility for collective performance, both individually and as a team. This sense of mutual responsibility also provides a valuable reward - the joy of achievement shared by all colleagues. We have heard more than once from members of effective teams that the way they energize and motivate such cooperation is incomparable with what it was in the previous, "normal" job.
On the other hand, groups created solely for the sake of becoming a team, or to improve performance, interaction, organizational efficiency, or to increase the level of development, rarely become truly effective teams - this is proved by the negative emotions left in many companies after experiments. with "quality circles" 3 , which have not been adapted to the solution of certain problems. Only when the relevant carding goals appear, the process of discussing themselves and approaches to their implementation is launched, this gives team members a clear choice: they can disagree with the goal and the way that the team has determined, and leave the game - or accept them and become responsible in including for the carding of colleagues.
Team discipline, the core principles of which we have mapped out, is always critical to success. However, it will be helpful to take one more step. Most teams can be divided into three groups: teams that make recommendations, teams that do things, and teams that manage things. In our experience, each of these categories faces its own challenges.
Commands that make recommendations
This could include task teams, project implementation teams, audit teams, quality assurance teams, and security teams. All of them are assigned to study and solve certain problems. Teams that make recommendations almost always have a predetermined completion date. For them, two things are critical: to ensure a quick and constructive start, and at the end to cope with the transfer of control necessary for the recommendations to be implemented.
The solution to the first problem lies in the complete clarity of the conditions of the team and its composition. In addition to knowing why their efforts are so important, task forces need to have a clear understanding of who will be leading them and how long they will need to be involved. Leadership can help by making sure that the team includes carders with the skills and influence needed to provide actionable recommendations that carry weight throughout the organization. Moreover, the bosses must provide the team with the necessary assistance, opening all doors and dealing with political obstacles.
Problems during the transfer of control are almost always encountered by the teams that make recommendations. To avoid trouble, the transfer must be attended by senior executives, and they will have to spend a lot of time and attention on it. The more top managers are confident that the recommendations will be implemented "by themselves", the less chance that this will happen. The more the team members are involved in the implementation of their recommendations, the higher the likelihood of success.
In cases where the recommendations are to be carding on by carders outside the task force, it is important to involve them in the process as early and often as possible - and, of course, even before the recommendations are developed. This can be done in a variety of ways, including through interviews, assistance with analyzing information, proposing and criticizing ideas, and conducting experiments and trials. At least one person responsible for implementing the recommendations should attend first a briefing to discuss the goal, objectives and approach of the operational team, and then to interim reviews of results.
Teams that do things
This category of groups includes carders who are “on the front line” and are responsible for the main production, development, operation, marketing, sales, service and other activities that add value. Aside from the individual exceptions for teams that create new products or processes, teams that do things usually do not have a specific end time for a project because their activities are continuous.
In deciding where team engagement will have the greatest impact, senior executives need to focus on what we call the critical section of the company. These are the places in the organization where the price and value of the products and services produced by the company are most directly determined. These may include departments that manage accounts, provide customer service, develop products, or measure performance. If performance at a critical point in a section depends on a mix of diverse skills, perspectives, and judgments in real time, then it is best to choose a team to carding with.
When an organization requires a significant number of teams at these locations, the truly difficult task of achieving maximum results for many groups will require a carefully designed set of management processes focused on performance. For senior executives, the challenge here is how to build the necessary systems and support processes without starting to promote teams for their own sake.
Going back to the beginning of our discussion of basic command discipline, the primary imperative here is a constant focus on performance. If management is unable to keep track of the connections between teams and their performance all the time, employees in the organization begin to suspect that "this year we are making teams." Top managers can help by using methods such as progressive payment schemes and training teams to respond to their needs in real time. But above all, the top leader must set clear yet motivating demands for teams, and then continually pay attention to how they are doing, while respecting the team's foundations and performance. The focus should be on individual teams and the specific challenges of their carding.
Carder's Teams that run things
While many leaders refer to groups in this category as teams, very few actually are. And groups that do become teams very rarely think of themselves in this way, because they focus primarily on the results of their activities. However, this category can include groups at the very top of the organization and at the very bottom, both among management and among functional services. It doesn't matter if these carders are responsible for thousands of employees or just a few carders, as long as the group controls some department, an operating program or an important service, it belongs to the teams that manage things.
The main challenge these teams face is determining whether their collective approach is correct. Many of them could be more effective as carding groups rather than teams. The main difference is whether the sum of the best traits of individuals corresponds to the current task of the activity, or whether the group must significantly increase productivity in order to get a truly collaborative product. While the team option promises better performance, it is also more risky, so managers must be extremely honest about the balance of power and resources.
Team members may have to overcome natural resistance before entrusting their fate to others. The cost of trying to imitate a team approach is high. At best, the costs will outweigh the benefits, carders will be distracted from their individual tasks and spend time and energy on additional carding. In the worst case, serious contradictions will arise, and they will make even the results that could be achieved with the help of the carding group unattainable.
Carding groups are less risky. An effective carding group takes a little time to form a goal, as this is always the leader. Meetings are held on issues of priority importance. Decisions are implemented through a special system of individual appointments and reporting. Thus, in most cases, if goals can be achieved with the help of individuals doing their job well, the team will be a more convenient, less risky, and less destructive choice than trying to achieve the hard-to-reach performance levels of teams. If there is no activity that requires a team approach, the effort spent on improving the effectiveness of the carding group will be much more meaningful than floundering around trying to create a real team.
That being said, we understand that the ultra-high level of productivity that teams can achieve is becoming critical for an increasing number of companies, especially during times of major transformation, during which company performance is influenced by changes in the behavior of each employee. When top managers use teams that manage things, they need to make sure they have successfully defined their specific goals and objectives.
This is the second major problem facing teams that manage things. Too often they confuse the broader purpose of the organization with the specific goals of their small group. According to the discipline, for a real team to appear, there must be a common goal - unique and formed specifically for these carders. It is also imperative that team members roll up their sleeves and do more than the end product of their individual carding. If a group of managers only monitors the economic performance of a part of the organization, they will not have any team goals of their own.
While the fundamentals of team science do not categorize teams at the top of the management structure, they certainly have the most difficulty. The complexity of long-term tasks, strict lead times, and the deeply ingrained individualism of big bosses all carding against the management team. However, such teams have the most power. At the beginning, we thought that the existence of teams at this level is almost impossible. We thought this because we looked at teams as units with a formal organizational structure: the leader plus his direct reports is the team. We then found that actual leadership teams are often smaller and less formalized.
Nevertheless, real teams at the top of the management structure of a large and complex organization are rare, very rare. Too many groups of leaders of large corporations do not allow themselves to achieve true team performance levels, because they believe that all their direct reports should be part of the team, that the goals of the team should coincide with the goals of the corporation, that the position of the team member determines the corresponding role much more than his the ability that the team should always be a team and that the leader is more important than doing real carding.
While it's understandable where these assumptions come from, most of them are unsubstantiated. They do not apply to the leadership teams we have examined, and if these assumptions are replaced with more realistic and flexible principles compatible with team discipline, then truly high team performance among top managers becomes quite achievable. Moreover, as more and more companies are faced with the need to manage global change in their own structures, over time we will see more real teams at the helm.
We believe that teams will be the primary unit of productivity in high performing organizations. But this does not mean that teams will completely supplant individual carding or formal hierarchies and formal processes. Rather, teams will strengthen existing structures without replacing them. Team building is possible wherever chain of command or organizational barriers stand in the way of the skills and knowledge required to achieve optimal results. Thus, the introduction of new products requires maintaining maximum functional efficiency through the structure of the organization and at the same time eliminating imbalances with the help of teams.
And the highest production efficiency requires maintaining purpose and leadership through hierarchy, while at the same time giving more energy and flexibility, which, again, self-directed teams have.
We are convinced that each company faces special challenges in its activities, for which the most convenient and powerful mechanism is the teams at the disposal of senior managers. Thus, the most important task of managers is to take care of the company's performance and what kind of teams are needed to achieve this. Consequently, top management must be able to recognize the unique capabilities of each team to achieve the desired results, use teams when they are the best carding tool, and promote the discipline that makes them effective. In this way, senior executives will create an environment conducive to improving the performance of teams, individuals, and the entire organization.
1. Piggyback transportation is the transportation of containers and trailers at the same time on special platform trains. - Approx. lane
2. Outward Bound is a non-profit training organization that conducts challenging expeditions that promote personal growth of participants, the development of their social skills, willpower and endurance. - Approx. ed.
3. "Quality circle" (English quality circle, QC) - a concept popular in the 1970-1980s; Quality circles are small groups of employees who meet regularly to address current issues (mainly issues of improving the quality of work). - Approx. ed.
These are the stories that happen in the carding of teams. Here we are talking about real teams doing productive activities, not about amorphous groups, which are only called teams because this word is believed to motivate carders and give them energy. The difference between teams that deliver results and all other groups is an issue that most of us pay very little attention to. Part of the problem is that behind the word “team” is a concept that everyone is familiar with (see the appendix “Not All Groups Are Commands: How To Find The Difference”).
The idea at a glance
The word "team" is pronounced so often that many leaders forget about its true meaning and its real power. In an unremarkable carding group, productivity is the sum of what its members do on their own. On the contrary, team productivity is the result of the efforts of both its individual members and the entire team.
Mutual responsibility can bring tremendous results, even though it seems obvious. It enables the team to achieve levels of productivity that far exceed the maximum capabilities of individual members. To do this, employees must do more than just listen to colleagues, respond constructively to other carder's words, and provide support to each other. In addition to these team values, team members must share the required discipline.
At least that's what we thought when we started our research for The Wisdom of Teams. We wanted to know how teams with different performance levels differ, where and which teams perform better, and what senior management can do to improve their effectiveness. We spoke with hundreds of carders from over 50 different teams from 30 organizations.
We found that there is a discipline frame carding that makes teams carding. We also learned that a team and good performance are inseparable: you can't have just one without the other. But carders use the word "team" so haphazardly that it interferes with learning and applying the discipline that leads to good performance. In order to make the right decisions about how and when to reward and use teams, and whether to do so at all, it is important for leaders to have a more accurate understanding of what is a team and what is not.
Most executives advocate team carding, and they are right. Teamcarding contains a set of values that encourage listening and responding constructively to other carder's opinions, providing support for each other, giving colleagues the opportunity to doubt and acknowledge their interests and achievements.
An idea in practice
The core team discipline includes five characteristics.
- A significant common goal, in the formation of which the team itself participates. Most teams react to an initial message that comes from outside the team. But in order to be successful, the team must internalize the goal, wrap it up with something meaningful for itself.
- Specific objectives of the activity that follow from the general goal.
For example, launching a new product on the market twice as fast as usual. Exciting tasks inspire, challenge, and feel the need for the team. They also neutralize negative processes in the team, forcing employees to understand that it is necessary to focus on joint efforts more than on differences in rank or status. - A combination of complementary skills. This item includes an amount of specialized technical or professional knowledge, problem-solving and decision-making abilities, and interpersonal skills. Initially, a successful team rarely has all the necessary qualities, its members develop them in the process of learning what is required to solve a difficult problem.
- A clear general understanding of how to carding. Teams must agree on who does what, what the schedule is, and how decisions will be made and changed. In a real team, all of its members do an equal amount of carding; everyone, including the leader, contributes in some way to the product of collective action.
- Mutual responsibility. Trust and interest in a case cannot be forced. The process of agreeing on desired goals becomes an ordeal in which team members form their responsibility to each other, not just to the leader.
- For a team whose goal is to make recommendations, this means getting started quickly and productively and ensuring that responsibility is clearly transferred to those who will implement the recommendations.
- For a team whose goal is to do things, this means focusing on the desired quality metrics.
- For a management team, the main goal is to separate the difficult tasks that really require teamcarding from those that don't need a team to solve.
These values help the team achieve good performance, as well as improve the performance of its individual members and the organization as a whole. But team carding values are not unique to teams and are not sufficient to support team performance (see the Building Teamcarding sidebar).
Not every carding collective is a team. Committees, boards, and focus groups do not necessarily become teams. Groups don't turn into teams just because someone calls them that. The entire staff of a large and complex organization will never be a team - but remember how often this common phrase is pronounced!
To understand how teams achieve increased productivity, we must distinguish between teams and other types of carding groups. This difference leads to a difference in performance. A carding group's productivity is the sum of what its members do as individuals. Team performance includes both individual results and what we call the product of collective action. This is something that two (or more) team members should do together, such as an interview, analysis, or experiment. Whatever the product of teamcarding is, it reflects the connection, the real contribution of the team members.
Carding groups are most common and most effective in large organizations where individual responsibility is especially important. The very best teams come together to share information, plans, and insights and increase individual productivity levels.
The focus of the carding group is always on individual goals and on the responsibilities of individuals. Its members are responsible only for their own result. They are not trying to achieve additional productivity gains that require two or more carders to carding together.
Teams are fundamentally different from carding groups because they assume both individual and mutual responsibility. Teams not only rely on group discussions, disputes and solutions, they not only rely on information available to all members and best practices to improve productivity. They create a product with the common input of all their members. This is what makes it possible to achieve a level of performance that is higher than the sum of the best individual performance of the team members. Simply put, a team is more than just the sum of its parts.
The first step to a discipline-building approach is to start thinking of each team as a separate unit of productivity, not just a collection of useful resources. After examining the ratings of existing teams - both successful and failing - we suggest the following. Take this as a carding definition of a real team, or better yet, as its fundamental order: a team is a small number of carders with complementary skills, united by a common goal, a set of common operational objectives and the same approach, as well as mutual responsibility for what are they doing.
The essence of a team is shared interest. Without it, groups carding as individuals, and with it they become a powerful unit of collective productivity. This commitment requires a goal that team members can believe in. If the goal of an organization is “to make our suppliers fully satisfy customers,” “to make our company rightfully proud,” or “to prove that all children can learn,” then credible team goals should contain an element of with victory, primacy, revolutionary change or innovation.
By carding to form a meaningful goal, teams gain a sense of direction, momentum, and commitment. Nevertheless, the formation of the team's involvement and its interest in the goal is quite possible even in the case when the initial direction is set from the outside. It is often assumed that the team will not begin to perceive the goal as their own until the bosses leave them alone, but in fact this often confuses potential teams rather than helps them. In reality, goals that are independently developed in a team are extremely rare - for example, they are found in entrepreneurial activity.
Most successful teams form their goals in response to demands or plans, which are usually set by senior management. In general, it helps teams define the results the company expects of them. Top management is responsible for clarifying the carding conditions, for the rationale and for the formulation of production problems, but managers must leave some room for maneuver so that the team can develop interest in their own interpretation of the common goal, define special tasks and timelines for themselves, your approach to business.
We build team activities
While no one can give an exact recipe for how to build a good performing team, let's take a look at a few of the approaches taken by many successful teams.
Define the urgency of the carding, set the performance indicators and the goal. All employees need to trust that the team is doing urgent and important carding. They also want to know what is expected of them. In fact, if the job has a strong case and needs to be done urgently, then the team is likely to reach its full potential, as happened with one customer service group. Members were told that further growth for the entire company would not be possible without significant improvements in their operations. Teams perform best in a competitive environment. This is why in companies where productivity is highly valued, teams are usually eagerly formed.
Choose team members for the skills they have and can acquire, not for their personality. No team succeeds if members do not have the skills to meet their goals and objectives. Nevertheless, in many teams it becomes clear which skills will be needed only after the formation of the team. A smart leader will select carders for the skills they possess and take into account their ability to improve existing skills and acquire new ones.
Pay close attention to the first meeting with the team and your actions. First impressions always mean a lot. When potential coworkers first get together, everyone carefully monitors the signals from those around them in order to confirm or refute their assumptions and doubts. Particularly pay attention to the leaders: to the future leader and managers who organize the team, look after it or in some other way influence it. And always what the leaders do turns out to be much more important than what they say. If a top manager, disregarding the opinion of the audience, goes out to call 10 minutes after the start of the meeting and does not return, carders understand what he wanted to tell them.
Establish some clear rules of conduct. All effective teams first and foremost develop some principles that help them achieve their goals and the best performance indicators. The most important rules regulate group behavior (for example, “no one should interrupt the conversation to make a phone call”), discussions (“no sacred cows”), confidentiality (“outside this room you can only talk about what we came to an agreement "), an analytical approach (" you can always identify favorable facts "), result orientation ("everyone takes on obligations and fulfills them"), constructiveness of disputes (" no "finger pointing" ") and, what is the most importantly, the contribution of each team member ("everyone is doing real carding"). Set several urgent tasks and performance-oriented goals, and stick to them. Effective teams detect their progress by performing key performance-oriented activities. Such actions can begin when several difficult goals have been set at once, which need to be achieved quickly. No real team exists without the results of its activities, so the sooner these results appear, the faster the team will pull together.
Challenge the team regularly with the latest information. The new information encourages the team to revise and enrich their understanding of what they are facing in their activities. Thus, it helps the team to form a common goal, set more clear objectives and improve the overall approach. For example, one product improvement team at a factory learned about the high cost of bad goods only after employees examined various types of defective items and tagged each with a price tag; after that it was already clear where to move on. Conversely, teams make mistakes when they assume that all the information they need is in the collective experience and knowledge of their members.
Spend a lot of time together. Common sense dictates to us that team members should be side by side for a long time, both on schedule and outside of carding, especially when the team is just formed. Indeed, creative insights and strengthening personal connections require unplanned and impromptu interactions as much as careful analysis of spreadsheets and customer interviews. Busy executives and managers very often deliberately reduce the time they spend together. The successful teams we studied gave themselves time to learn how to be a team. It is not necessary to be physically close all the time; communication using electronic means of communication, fax and telephone is also quite suitable.
Harness the power of positive feedback, recognition, and rewards. Positive reinforcement carding as well in a team setting as it does in any other setting. Distributing Gold Stars helps to shape new behaviors that are critical to team performance. If carders are wary, for example, by their shy colleague's first attempts at voice and input, they can provide honest, positive reinforcement that will increase the person’s desire to participate in the community’s activities. Beyond bonuses, there are many ways to celebrate successes and motivate a team, from a senior executive talking to a subordinate about the urgency of their carding to using non-monetary prizes. However, the most coveted reward is usually the satisfaction of one's own accomplishments, shared by all team members.
The best teams devote a lot of time and effort to finding, forming and agreeing on a goal that belongs simultaneously to the entire team and to each of its members. This continues for as long as the team has existed. In contrast, doomed groups rarely develop a common goal. For a variety of reasons - such as lack of focus on their performance, lack of resources, or poor leadership - they don't rally around a motivating goal.
In addition, the best teams transform the overall goal into separate objectives of their activities, for example, reducing the scrap rate of suppliers by 50% or increasing the math scores of graduates from 40 to 95%. Moreover, if the team fails to form such tasks, or if they are not directly related to a common goal, then employees begin to get confused, the group falls apart and its performance does not rise above average. On the contrary, if the goal and objectives of the activity are built on each other and are combined with a common interest in the business, then the team becomes a powerful production unit.
Transforming more general guidelines into specific, meaningful tasks for the team is, of course, the first step towards creating an important goal for its members. Special challenges - for example, launching a product to market twice as fast as usual, responding to customer requests 24 hours a day, or achieving zero scrap while reducing production costs by 40% - become a solid support for the team. This happens for several reasons.
- The specific tasks of the team's activities help determine the scope of carding, which may differ depending on the overall goal of the entire organization and on goals in individual areas. As a result, this amount of carding requires the collective effort of all team members to do something special, important to the result. On the contrary, if carders just get together from time to time to make joint decisions, it will not improve the performance in any way.
- The specificity of goals facilitates interaction and constructive conflicts within the team. For example, when carders in a factory set themselves the goal of reducing the average changeover time of machine tools to two hours, the clarity of that goal forces the team to focus on what needs to be done to achieve or revise it. When the goals are clear, the questions of how to achieve those goals and whether they need to be changed become the subjects of discussion. When goals are vague or unrealistic, discussions will be much less productive.
- The achievability of specific goals helps teams focus on getting results. For example, the development team at Eli Lilly's Peripheral Systems received clear criteria for launching an ultrasound transducer to help clinicians more accurately locate deep veins and arteries. The sensor was required to be able to examine tissues with an acoustic signal to a certain depth, to operate up to hundreds of times a day, and to have a lower cost compared to the predetermined one. Since the team was able to evaluate their performance against each of these specific goals, they knew where they were and whether they had achieved the desired result.
- Outward Bound 2 and other team building programs demonstrate that specific goals have a positive impact on team behavior. When a small group of carders set themselves the task of overcoming an obstacle or reducing the cycle time by 50%, special titles, privileges and the number of stars on their epaulets gradually recede into the background. A successful team evaluates what and how each of its members can do for further advancement, and - what is much more important - proceeds from the goals of their activities, and not from the status of the person or his personal qualities.
- Specific objectives allow the team to achieve small victories on the way to the big goal. This is invaluable for building motivation and overcoming the inevitable obstacles when a goal looms in the long run. For example, the Knight Ridder team at the beginning of this article has turned the narrow task of fixing bugs into an attractive goal of better customer service.
- Activity goals should be exciting. They are symbols of accomplishment that give motivation and energize. They challenge group members to a difficult task: as a team to commit themselves to changing the way things are done. A challenge that requires strength and nerves, urgency and a healthy fear of failure force the team to look at an achievable, albeit difficult, task with a collective gaze. No one but the team itself can do this. The challenge was thrown to her.
Almost all effective teams that we have seen, heard about or carding on ourselves, had from 2 to 25 members. For example, the team from Burlington Northern, which set up a piggyback business, has seven carders. The Knight Ridder publishing team has 14 members. Most successful teams have less than 10 members. It cannot be admitted that a small team size is a much more practical indicator than success always and in everything. In theory, a large group, say fifty carders, can become a team. But it is more likely to break down into smaller “teams within a team” rather than function as a coherent whole.
Why? It is difficult for a large number of carders to constructively interact with each other as a single team; they do much less real carding together. It is much more likely that 10, rather than 50, carders will overcome their individual, functional and hierarchical differences, become one and take collective responsibility for the results.
In addition, large groups face logistical challenges such as finding physical space and meeting time. They also have to deal with more complex obstacles, such as herd instinct or crowd psychology, that prevent the intensive exchange of views necessary to build a team. As a result, when large groups try to carding out a common goal, they only get untenable "missions" and general intentions that cannot be turned into anything concrete. Such groups tend to quickly reach the stage where meetings become boring routines - a clear sign that most carders in the group do not know exactly why they came here, other than some intention to do better. Anyone who has come across this at least once understands how annoying it is.
In addition to the fact that the size of the team should not exceed the recommended size, it is important to have the right mix of skills - that is, the employees together should have all the skills necessary to carry out the carding ahead. It seems obvious, but usually it is not possible to achieve this in potential teams. Skill requirements can be divided into three fairly understandable categories.
Professional competence
A group of doctors is unlikely to pursue employment discrimination in court. However, teams of doctors and lawyers are often involved in medical malpractice or personal injury cases. Likewise, teams that develop new products that include only marketers or engineers are less likely to be successful than those where both professions complement each other.
Problem solving and decision making skills
Teams must be able to recognize the challenges and opportunities that come along the way, assess the chances of moving forward, and then make the necessary concessions and decide to move on. Most teams need members with these skills from the start, although many develop them best on the job.
Interpersonal skills
General understanding and a common goal for all cannot appear without effective team interaction and constructive conflicts in it, which, in turn, depends on interpersonal skills. They include the ability to take risks, healthy criticism, objectivity, the ability to actively listen and give others the right to doubt, respect for others' interests and achievements.
Obviously, no team can come into existence without some minimum skill set of its members. This is especially true for professional skills. However, remember how often you have had to carding in a team whose members only got into it because of personal relationships or their place in the organization. In such cases, no one thinks about the ability of team members to somehow combine.
At the other extreme, when selecting carders for a team, skills are given too much importance. However, all of the successful teams we've come across lacked the full skill set in the beginning. The Burlington Northern team, for example, initially lacked a qualified marketer, even though the operational challenges were market-related. In fact, we are learning that teams are a powerful mechanism for developing the skills needed to cope with the difficult challenges that stand in the way. Accordingly, the choice of team members should be related to both existing skills and the ability to learn something new.
Effective teams develop a strong interest in a common approach, that is, in how to carding together to achieve a goal. Employees must agree on who to entrust the carding, how the schedule will be drawn up and maintained, what skills need to be developed, how long-term team memberships can be earned, and how decisions should be made and changed collectively. This commitment is just as important to the performance of the team as the commitment of its members to their own goals and objectives.
Agreement on the specifics of the job and how to carding together to combine the skills of all members and improve collective performance is central to shaping a common approach. There is probably no need to prove the detriment of a situation where all the real carding is shifted to a few team members (or to those whom others consider to be losers) and only meetings and control activities remain joint - this approach cannot strengthen the real team. All members of a successful team do an equal amount of carding, everyone, including the leader, makes a concrete contribution to the creation of the product. This principle is emotionally very important and affects the overall performance.
When carders join a team, especially if it was created for business reasons, each of them already has some kind of carding assignments, and also has some strengths and weaknesses, reflecting a wide variety of abilities, backgrounds, character traits and prejudices. The team will be able to develop and come to an agreement on the best way to solve their problems only after carders open up to each other and decide together how to apply total human resources to a common goal. At the heart of this long and sometimes difficult interaction is the division of roles, where the team honestly reviews which members are best suited for each assignment and how the individual areas of carding and the carders assigned to them fit together. Basically, the team members enter into a social contract with each other,
No group will become a team until they accept shared responsibility. Like a shared goal and approach, shared responsibility is an ordeal. Just think of a small but very important difference, say, between the phrases "the boss made me responsible" or "we think we are responsible." The first position can lead to the second, but without the second command, there will be no.
Companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Motorola have a deeply ingrained carding ethic that teaches teams naturally when there is a clear carding task that requires a team effort rather than an individual effort. In such companies, the factor of mutual responsibility is a matter of course. “We are all in the same boat” - this is the slogan under which they achieve high performance.
At its core, team responsibility is about the sincere promises we make to ourselves and others, the promises that underpin the two critical characteristics of effective teams - commitment and trust. Most of us are wary of situations where we are going to be part of a potential team, because deep-rooted individualism and previous experience discourage us from entrusting our fate to the hands of other carders or taking responsibility for them. Teams don't succeed if they don't pay attention to this behavior or hope that things will carding out by themselves.
Mutual responsibility cannot be forced, just as carders cannot be forced to trust each other. But when the team shares common goals, objectives and approach to their solution, mutual responsibility complements them in a completely natural way. Responsibility grows out of the time, energy and action invested in understanding what the team is trying to achieve and how best to do it. At the same time, responsibility supports all the efforts of the team members.
When carders carding together to achieve a common goal, trust and interest will surely come. Consequently, teams with a strong common goal and common approach will inevitably acquire responsibility for collective performance, both individually and as a team. This sense of mutual responsibility also provides a valuable reward - the joy of achievement shared by all colleagues. We have heard more than once from members of effective teams that the way they energize and motivate such cooperation is incomparable with what it was in the previous, "normal" job.
On the other hand, groups created solely for the sake of becoming a team, or to improve performance, interaction, organizational efficiency, or to increase the level of development, rarely become truly effective teams - this is proved by the negative emotions left in many companies after experiments. with "quality circles" 3 , which have not been adapted to the solution of certain problems. Only when the relevant carding goals appear, the process of discussing themselves and approaches to their implementation is launched, this gives team members a clear choice: they can disagree with the goal and the way that the team has determined, and leave the game - or accept them and become responsible in including for the carding of colleagues.
Team discipline, the core principles of which we have mapped out, is always critical to success. However, it will be helpful to take one more step. Most teams can be divided into three groups: teams that make recommendations, teams that do things, and teams that manage things. In our experience, each of these categories faces its own challenges.
Commands that make recommendations
This could include task teams, project implementation teams, audit teams, quality assurance teams, and security teams. All of them are assigned to study and solve certain problems. Teams that make recommendations almost always have a predetermined completion date. For them, two things are critical: to ensure a quick and constructive start, and at the end to cope with the transfer of control necessary for the recommendations to be implemented.
The solution to the first problem lies in the complete clarity of the conditions of the team and its composition. In addition to knowing why their efforts are so important, task forces need to have a clear understanding of who will be leading them and how long they will need to be involved. Leadership can help by making sure that the team includes carders with the skills and influence needed to provide actionable recommendations that carry weight throughout the organization. Moreover, the bosses must provide the team with the necessary assistance, opening all doors and dealing with political obstacles.
Problems during the transfer of control are almost always encountered by the teams that make recommendations. To avoid trouble, the transfer must be attended by senior executives, and they will have to spend a lot of time and attention on it. The more top managers are confident that the recommendations will be implemented "by themselves", the less chance that this will happen. The more the team members are involved in the implementation of their recommendations, the higher the likelihood of success.
In cases where the recommendations are to be carding on by carders outside the task force, it is important to involve them in the process as early and often as possible - and, of course, even before the recommendations are developed. This can be done in a variety of ways, including through interviews, assistance with analyzing information, proposing and criticizing ideas, and conducting experiments and trials. At least one person responsible for implementing the recommendations should attend first a briefing to discuss the goal, objectives and approach of the operational team, and then to interim reviews of results.
Teams that do things
This category of groups includes carders who are “on the front line” and are responsible for the main production, development, operation, marketing, sales, service and other activities that add value. Aside from the individual exceptions for teams that create new products or processes, teams that do things usually do not have a specific end time for a project because their activities are continuous.
In deciding where team engagement will have the greatest impact, senior executives need to focus on what we call the critical section of the company. These are the places in the organization where the price and value of the products and services produced by the company are most directly determined. These may include departments that manage accounts, provide customer service, develop products, or measure performance. If performance at a critical point in a section depends on a mix of diverse skills, perspectives, and judgments in real time, then it is best to choose a team to carding with.
When an organization requires a significant number of teams at these locations, the truly difficult task of achieving maximum results for many groups will require a carefully designed set of management processes focused on performance. For senior executives, the challenge here is how to build the necessary systems and support processes without starting to promote teams for their own sake.
Going back to the beginning of our discussion of basic command discipline, the primary imperative here is a constant focus on performance. If management is unable to keep track of the connections between teams and their performance all the time, employees in the organization begin to suspect that "this year we are making teams." Top managers can help by using methods such as progressive payment schemes and training teams to respond to their needs in real time. But above all, the top leader must set clear yet motivating demands for teams, and then continually pay attention to how they are doing, while respecting the team's foundations and performance. The focus should be on individual teams and the specific challenges of their carding.
Carder's Teams that run things
While many leaders refer to groups in this category as teams, very few actually are. And groups that do become teams very rarely think of themselves in this way, because they focus primarily on the results of their activities. However, this category can include groups at the very top of the organization and at the very bottom, both among management and among functional services. It doesn't matter if these carders are responsible for thousands of employees or just a few carders, as long as the group controls some department, an operating program or an important service, it belongs to the teams that manage things.
The main challenge these teams face is determining whether their collective approach is correct. Many of them could be more effective as carding groups rather than teams. The main difference is whether the sum of the best traits of individuals corresponds to the current task of the activity, or whether the group must significantly increase productivity in order to get a truly collaborative product. While the team option promises better performance, it is also more risky, so managers must be extremely honest about the balance of power and resources.
Team members may have to overcome natural resistance before entrusting their fate to others. The cost of trying to imitate a team approach is high. At best, the costs will outweigh the benefits, carders will be distracted from their individual tasks and spend time and energy on additional carding. In the worst case, serious contradictions will arise, and they will make even the results that could be achieved with the help of the carding group unattainable.
Carding groups are less risky. An effective carding group takes a little time to form a goal, as this is always the leader. Meetings are held on issues of priority importance. Decisions are implemented through a special system of individual appointments and reporting. Thus, in most cases, if goals can be achieved with the help of individuals doing their job well, the team will be a more convenient, less risky, and less destructive choice than trying to achieve the hard-to-reach performance levels of teams. If there is no activity that requires a team approach, the effort spent on improving the effectiveness of the carding group will be much more meaningful than floundering around trying to create a real team.
That being said, we understand that the ultra-high level of productivity that teams can achieve is becoming critical for an increasing number of companies, especially during times of major transformation, during which company performance is influenced by changes in the behavior of each employee. When top managers use teams that manage things, they need to make sure they have successfully defined their specific goals and objectives.
This is the second major problem facing teams that manage things. Too often they confuse the broader purpose of the organization with the specific goals of their small group. According to the discipline, for a real team to appear, there must be a common goal - unique and formed specifically for these carders. It is also imperative that team members roll up their sleeves and do more than the end product of their individual carding. If a group of managers only monitors the economic performance of a part of the organization, they will not have any team goals of their own.
While the fundamentals of team science do not categorize teams at the top of the management structure, they certainly have the most difficulty. The complexity of long-term tasks, strict lead times, and the deeply ingrained individualism of big bosses all carding against the management team. However, such teams have the most power. At the beginning, we thought that the existence of teams at this level is almost impossible. We thought this because we looked at teams as units with a formal organizational structure: the leader plus his direct reports is the team. We then found that actual leadership teams are often smaller and less formalized.
Nevertheless, real teams at the top of the management structure of a large and complex organization are rare, very rare. Too many groups of leaders of large corporations do not allow themselves to achieve true team performance levels, because they believe that all their direct reports should be part of the team, that the goals of the team should coincide with the goals of the corporation, that the position of the team member determines the corresponding role much more than his the ability that the team should always be a team and that the leader is more important than doing real carding.
While it's understandable where these assumptions come from, most of them are unsubstantiated. They do not apply to the leadership teams we have examined, and if these assumptions are replaced with more realistic and flexible principles compatible with team discipline, then truly high team performance among top managers becomes quite achievable. Moreover, as more and more companies are faced with the need to manage global change in their own structures, over time we will see more real teams at the helm.
We believe that teams will be the primary unit of productivity in high performing organizations. But this does not mean that teams will completely supplant individual carding or formal hierarchies and formal processes. Rather, teams will strengthen existing structures without replacing them. Team building is possible wherever chain of command or organizational barriers stand in the way of the skills and knowledge required to achieve optimal results. Thus, the introduction of new products requires maintaining maximum functional efficiency through the structure of the organization and at the same time eliminating imbalances with the help of teams.
And the highest production efficiency requires maintaining purpose and leadership through hierarchy, while at the same time giving more energy and flexibility, which, again, self-directed teams have.
We are convinced that each company faces special challenges in its activities, for which the most convenient and powerful mechanism is the teams at the disposal of senior managers. Thus, the most important task of managers is to take care of the company's performance and what kind of teams are needed to achieve this. Consequently, top management must be able to recognize the unique capabilities of each team to achieve the desired results, use teams when they are the best carding tool, and promote the discipline that makes them effective. In this way, senior executives will create an environment conducive to improving the performance of teams, individuals, and the entire organization.
1. Piggyback transportation is the transportation of containers and trailers at the same time on special platform trains. - Approx. lane
2. Outward Bound is a non-profit training organization that conducts challenging expeditions that promote personal growth of participants, the development of their social skills, willpower and endurance. - Approx. ed.
3. "Quality circle" (English quality circle, QC) - a concept popular in the 1970-1980s; Quality circles are small groups of employees who meet regularly to address current issues (mainly issues of improving the quality of work). - Approx. ed.
