Do You Really Need a Team?: For the Practicing Manager

Kossler, Kanaga

• Publisher: Center for Creative Leadership Press
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9781882197668
• eBook ISBN: 9781604916843
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Despite all of the attention and accolades that organizations place on teams, they are not always the most efficient way to meet a business challenge. It's expensive and time consuming to launch a team, and it's a full-time job to lead a team toward achieving organizational objectives. This guidebook was written to help managers determine if a team is the right tool for meeting a business goal, and explains potential obstacles and challenges to forming a team that can operate at its full potential.

The Way We Work

Look around your organization and you will find several types of work units. Broadly speaking, an organization can bring five categories of units (individual, workgroup, collaborative workgroup, team, and high-performance team) to bear on business challenges. By understanding how each of these work units gets results, you can determine which of them has the degree of collaboration you need to achieve the organization’s goal. If your task doesn’t require a great deal of interdependent collaboration, you don’t need a team to meet your business objectives.

Team or Teamwork?

Some of the unquestioned enthusiasm organizations hold for teams has to do with the high value they place on teamwork. By equating teams with teamwork, some organizations create misperceptions about teams that become obstacles to the team’s achieving results. Teamwork means cooperation. It calls for an awareness and respect for the contributions of others. It asks for a helpful and supportive attitude, as opposed to a hostile and adversarial one.

Teamwork is a valuable attribute in any joint endeavor, but such cooperation doesn’t turn a group into a team. A team is a unit formed to achieve specific results—winning a game, managing an organization, or developing a new product. In other words, individuals working well together is ideal, but team members working together enhances results.

Individual

Some kinds of work can and should be handled by a single person. That individual has all the expertise, knowledge, and skills needed to do the job and is solely accountable for getting the job done. If the workload increases so that one person can no longer handle it, the company can create additional positions.

Workgroup

This work unit consists of a group of people who may work together and may all do essentially the same kind of work but who are not dependent on each other for information and skills needed to accomplish the job. For instance, the regional sales managers of a large national company would constitute a workgroup, even though they aren’t located in the same office. In a human resources department of a large organization, all staff members with responsibilities for administering benefits could be considered a workgroup. They all perform similar or related tasks, but the amount of work is too large for one person.

Collaborative Workgroup

This is a common work unit category. Individuals in such a group need information from one another in order to achieve results. The work might be handed off from one individual to another, as in a manufacturing system. Each individual completes one step in a complex process that leads to a finished product. In collaborative workgroups, one person’s errors in execution affect the ability of others in the group to do their work.

Well-functioning collaborative workgroups may look like teams, but they differ in that each individual is accountable for his or her work and is rewarded for individual performance. Another difference is that collaborative workgroups are most often permanent parts of an organization (a department, division, or branch office, for example), but teams are more often created to perform a specific task and dissolved when the mission has been completed.

Team

A team is a small group of interdependent individuals who collectively have the expertise, knowledge, and skills needed to c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Teams—Fast Track or Trendy Trap?
• How Teams Work
• The Way We Work
• If You Need a Team, You Need Support
• Go Team
• Suggested Readings
• Background
• Key Point Summary