Handbook for Creative Team Leaders

Tudor Rickards, Susan Moger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351931786
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Every worthwhile organization strives continuously to improve. What the authors of this groundbreaking book offer is nothing less than a system for achieving peak performance. As a result of their work with more than 2000 teams, in some 40 countries across the globe, the authors identified the 7 factors that distinguish what they call 'dream teams' and on that basis they developed the structured approach described in the Handbook. Part I sets out the principles that underlie team performance. Part II shows how to train teams to become more creative. Finally, in Part III, the authors demonstrate their ideas in action with real-life examples from a wide variety of organizational settings. They emphasize throughout the role of leadership in stimulating creativity and innovation, and they explain how to inject new dynamism into existing organizational systems and practices. Anyone involved in teamworking would profit from a close study of the Handbook. It will be especially valuable to team leaders and facilitators, to project managers and to HRD practitioners and consultants.

PART I
CREATIVE TEAMS IN PRINCIPLE

1AN ANATOMY OF TEAMS

An insight into team performance

A few years ago we hit on a powerful insight about teams. We concluded that almost all teams fitted into one of three, easy-to-identify, categories which were differentiated by seven factors. It also became clear that teams performed as if there were barriers that were hard to break through on all seven factors. We later came to the conclusion presented in this book, that team performance on all these factors could be improved through deliberate interventions by a team leader. The insight required us to modify our understanding of a well-known model of group formation.

The three team categories

The first category contained a small number of teams with great team spirit that demonstrated sustained outstanding performance. We began calling these the dream teams. The second group, and by far the largest, contained standard teams. The final group, fortunately with the fewest examples, was made up of what we came to call teams from hell.

As we began looking more systematically at team behaviours, evidence accumulated in favour of the three categories. For example, when we described them in our consultancy and training work, there was widespread support for our idea. We are now confident that the overwhelming majority of professionals and managers are able to recognize the three groupings from their personal experience of teams.

Our explanation for our findings begins with the well-established notion that group formation passes through the stages form, storm, norm and perform. We now believe that our teams from hell never proceed beyond the storm stage. We also believe that the theory needs an additional stage. Dream teams pass through the storm, form and norm stages, and then outperform standard teams by challenging the norms they have previously established.

AN EXAMPLE OF A DREAM TEAM

One Saturday evening, a chief executive officer stood helplessly by and watched her main manufacturing plant destroyed by fire. She was one of the first eyewitnesses on the scene. Within hours many of her employees had made their way to the site. There followed a weekend of round-the-clock efforts. By the following Monday morning staff were operating from a mobile office shell, reassuring anxious customers they would be able to complete their orders. The commitment of the team transmitted itself to the customers, and not a single order was lost. The company has since gone from strength to strength. This is but one example of the exceptional and sustained efforts we have come across in dream teams.

AN EXAMPLE OF STANDARD TEAMS

A global organization runs an annual competition to reward its most innovative teams. Each division has to submit a nomination, describing the achievements of the team during the year and providing an indication of the general team processes. Typically the judges have a hard time distinguishing between the performance of most of the entries and the general quality is high. After all, this is a successful international company. This has good and bad aspects to it. Only in unusual circumstances do its teams deviate from the standard or norm. The similarity in performance across divisions is an excellent illustration of how an organization expects, and thus gets, a certain standard of performance.

AN EXAMPLE OF A TEAM FROM HELL

In November 1990, Britain watched in growing amazement as Sir Geoffrey Howe addressed a packed House of Commons. In quiet and controlled tones he unleashed a devastating personal attack that was to lead to the rapid overthrow of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The unusual aspect of the confrontation was that the speaker was a former member of Mrs Thatcher’s own top team of cabinet ministers. Mrs Thatcher, for all her international reputation, had evidentially presided over a classic team from hell.

Are there glass ceilings to team performance?

When we start discussing these three classes of teams, we are asked one question before any others. Can teams change their standard of performance? Might there be versions of the famous ‘glass ceiling’, as shown in Figure 1.1, barring teams from hell from reaching modest standards of performance, and barring standard teams from becoming dream teams?

NOT ALL TEAMS ARE EQUAL

In our work with one global organization, we noticed a remarkable uniformity of performance demonstrated in teams across all the divisions of the company. The corporate culture seemed to establish expected norms of behaviour which were reflected in the team reports of their innovative achievements. Most teams stuck to those norms.

However, even within this organization, we would sometimes come across examples of non-standard teams. One year, for example, the clear winner of the innovation award was a team that had established a manufacturing plant in a remote region of China, overcoming a thousand unexpected difficulties. The judges were unanimous in recognizing this dream team.

In complete contrast, in that same year, another team submitted an entry that read like an organizational suicide note. ‘We didn’t complete our project due to unforeseeable circumstances,’ the team reported. A catalogue of excuses was made for the team’s poor performance, with hints at unfair treatment, lack of resources and internal wrangles The judges were well aware of the team’s circumstances and found the excuses unconvincing. Not only did the team perform poorly; it seemed quite unable to understand the reasons for that poor performance. As we will see, a lack of self-awareness of this kind is one of the features of a team from hell.

In this one organization we see how a corporate climate establishes norms of performance expected of its teams. The standard team behaviours are almost universal. However, there is still scope for exceptional performance and dream team behaviours will shine out in contrast.

The short answer is yes – there are such barriers. The evidence we have collected shows that, time and again, dream teams go on being dream teams and standard teams persist in their standard level of performance. The longer answer is that the barriers are real, but to some degree imposed by the teams themselves. The glass ceilings can be shattered. One saying sums up the self-imposed nature of the glass ceiling to team performance, as a step to doing something positive about it. As shown in Figure 1.2, this is

If you always do what you’ve always done –

you’ll always get what you’ve always got.

The search for team improvement turns out to be one in which ‘always doing what we’ve always done’ becomes clearer, so that the team can consider other ways of doing things, and other things to do.

Figure 1.1 Team types and glass ceilings

Figure 1.2 Why teams do not change

To identify the glass ceiling, and what might be done to shatter it, we will first summarize those patterns of behaviour that distinguish the three types of team.

Seven factors that shape team performance

We believe that there are seven factors by which dream teams may be distinguished from teams from hell. Most of them can be found in one form or another in other studies of team behaviours and it is highly unlikely that one set of factors, ours or anyone else’s, will serve for all kinds of team. Our only claim for the list we are about to provide is this: the factors were derived from our experiences of working with many organizations in efforts to improve the creative performance of their teams. As a consequence we have identified connections between the factors and practical steps for achieving team development.

Figure 1.3 shows the seven factors as they appear in the extreme kinds of team, dream teams and teams from hell. These somewhat exaggerated contrasts are a good way of introducing the seven factors.

The seven factors are strongly interactive. That is to say, the dream teams score highly on all seven factors; the teams from hell come out poorly on all seven. Standard teams fit somewhere between the two extremes. For the moment we will concentrate on the dream teams and teams from hell and these give very clear indications of the seven factors.

Figure 1.3 The seven secrets of dream teams and seven sins of teams from hell

THE ‘ALL OR NOTHING’ NATURE OF THE SEVEN FACTORS OF EFFECTIVENESS

It is not always possible to examine a team’s characteristics on all seven factors from outside the team and at a given point in time. This restricts our claims to the status of a theory. When we have been able to collect information on all seven factors, however, the result has been clear cut: the performance is ‘all or nothing’ on all seven. It seems unlikely that one or more of the factors may be ‘pulling’ the others along and we have concluded that the factors are mutually reinforcing. They are signals of the team’s general sets of behaviours, or norms. As we show, the extra ingredient necessary to influence all seven factors in the same direction is the leadership process.

Think of a team as a rowing boat, and the factors as rowers. Most teams have the factors operating according to the required procedures and to a given standard of performance. The team that achieves dream performance has successfully stepped up the pace and all seven rowers (factors) are performing in beyond-standard fashion.

The majority of teams operate under standard conditions. And ‘if you always row like you have always rowed, you will always race like you have always raced’ – until something happens. If one rower loses an oar the norms are swiftly disrupted and overall performance slips. Eventually the boat reaches a lower norm of performance all round; in other words, a standard team has drifted in performance after a setback.

Teams from hell never get their rowing pattern right. Whichever factor you study the signals are not good.

In teamwork, the old metaphor is very apt. All members are in the same boat.

PLATFORM OF UNDERSTANDING

The first factor differentiating dream teams from teams from hell is the presence of a strong platform of understanding. This has been largely ignored in other books about teamwork, although perhaps implied by notions of team learning. It refers to the powerful cohesive effect produced when team members understand and respect each other’s viewpoints. Building a platform of understanding is a means of strengthening performance in the other six factors.

This concerns those aspects of team dynamics that are needed to achieve shared values, beliefs and goals. One of the most important principles of creative teamwork is developing mutual respect among team members. This mutuality principle is lacking in teams from hell and underdeveloped in standard teams. Structures for enhancing team creativity include techniques for strengthening this platform of understanding. Of specific importance is the ‘Both And’ or ‘Yes And’ technique through which team members are able to achieve win-win outcomes when engaged in team work.

SHARED VISION

All teams have shared responsibility for achieving something, even though the ‘something’ varies from team to team. Few teams are able to convert this responsibility into a shared vision that motivates and sustains team progress. Although shared visions are much talked about in organizational texts, the difficulty lies in avoiding lip service to a shared vision and in seeking a practical set of steps to identify one if it is suspect or missing altogether.

One of the triumphs of techniques for stimulating creativity is accumulating evidence that a team can take control over its own processes of seeking and discovering a shared vision, for instance by introducing metaphors into team discussions that lead to powerful and motivating images for the team. We will show in Chapter 3 how such vis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword by Fran Cotton
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Creative teams in principle
• Part II Creative teams in practice
• Part III Creative teams in action
• Bibliography
• Index