Building a High Performance Team

Proven techniques for effective team working

Sarah Cook

• Publisher: IT Governance Publishing
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781849281409
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Practical tips and advice on developing an integrated, high performance team

As an IT manager, you depend on collaboration and teamwork. Whether you're a team leader, member, or part of a cross-function team, the successful implementation of your IT projects depends on team synergy and performance.

Ideal for IT managers and anyone working with IT professionals, this book will help you to understand the characteristics of a high-performance team. It also gives you the skills to assess the overall performance of your own team, and develop an action plan for realising its potential.

Benefits to business include:

• Recognise the key characteristics of a high-performance team
• Assess the current productivity of your own team
• Develop a step by step action plan for transforming your team's performance

Building a High-Performance Team

Proven techniques for
effective team working

SARAH COOK

Soft Skills for
IT Professionals

FOREWORD

IT is often seen as a ‘hard-skill’ profession where there is no place for soft skills. Yet the importance of soft skills for the IT professional should not be underrated; they underlie all behaviours and interactions. Both IT and non-IT professionals need to work together and learn from each other for effective business performance. All professionals, be they in IT or elsewhere, need to understand how their actions and reactions impact on their behaviour and working relationships.

This series of books aims to provide practical guidance on a range of soft-skills areas for those in IT and also for others, including those who deal with IT professionals, in order to facilitate more effective and co-operative working practices.

Each book is written by an experienced consultant and trainer. Their approach throughout is essentially practical and direct, offering a wealth of tried and tested professional guidance. Each chapter contains a team diagnostic and focused questions to help the manager plan and steer their course. The language used is jargon-free, and a bibliography and a helpful glossary of terms are included at the end of the book.

Angela Wilde, January 2009

PREFACE

This book is intended to provide IT managers with practical advice and tips on how to create a high-performance team.

IT managers’ work cannot be achieved without collaboration and teamwork. Whether leading a team, or working as a team member or part of a cross-functional team, the successful implementation of IT projects depends on effective team working.

This book will help you to create a strong team. It is designed to assist you in understanding what the characteristics are of a high-performance team, to help you assess where your team stacks up and to develop a plan of action for realising team potential.

I hope that you will find this book informative and practical and that it provides you with the springboard to creating a high-performance team.

Sarah Cook

The Stairway Consultancy Ltd

www.thestairway.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Cook is the Managing Director of the Stairway Consultancy Ltd. She has 15 years’ consulting experience specialising in team building, leadership and change. Prior to this, Sarah worked for Unilever and as Head of Customer Care for a retail marketing consultancy.

As well as having practical experience of helping to create high-performance teams across the globe, Sarah is a business author and has written widely on the topic of team building, leadership, management development and coaching. She also speaks regularly at conferences and seminars on these topics.

Sarah is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and a Chartered Marketeer. She has an MA from Cambridge University and an MBA. Sarah is an accredited user of a wide range of psychometric and team diagnostic tools. She may be contacted via [email protected].

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to acknowledge:

Bruce Tuckman for his four stages of team development.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, Routledge, 2008.

Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, The Wisdom of Teams, Harper Business Books, 1994.

R. Meredith Belbin, Management Teams: Why They Succeed and Fail, Butterworth Heinemann, 2nd edition, 2003.

Steve Macaulay, Cranfield School of Management, for his thoughts on conflict management.

Angeles Arrien for the ‘Lessons from Geese’, transcribed here from a speech given at the 1991 Organizational Development Network.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1: Characteristics of a High-Performance Team

Chapter 2: The Stages of Team Development

Chapter 3: Roles People Play in a Team

Chapter 4: Creating a Team Vision and a Set of Values

Chapter 5: Effective Team Meetings

Chapter 6: Dealing with Conflict in a Team

Chapter 7: Cross-functional Team Working

Bibliography

Glossary

ITG Resources

INTRODUCTION

Isabelle had worked in the IT department of a large global organisation for the past three years. She led a small team of five programmers who had also been in the organisation for about the same time as her. In the business the team had a good reputation for delivery. They were a tight-knit bunch and got on well.

Isabelle and her team were therefore initially very dismayed to learn about the global restructuring of the IT department. This involved breaking up existing teams and reforming them on a multidisciplinary basis. Isabelle found herself heading a completely new team, spread across three geographical locations and including two homeworkers. To Isabelle it was as if she had taken on a job in a new organisation. Everything had changed and nothing was as it had been before. The morale of the new team was poor and deadlines and targets were being missed.

Isabelle’s new boss had set her an objective of creating a high-performance team within the next six months. Isabelle secretly wondered if this would ever be achieved.

Does the situation seem familiar? You may not have been faced with the same challenge as Isabelle, but in the IT world today change is a constant. IT professionals are expected to work in and across a wide number of teams, be it their own team, a cross-functional team or a project team.

How do IT professionals develop a high-performance team? What are the best approaches to and techniques for harnessing the strength of the team to achieve organisational goals? How do you manage a wide stakeholder group at the same time as developing a great team?

This book is dedicated to people like yourself and Isabelle. It provides practical advice and proven techniques to help develop a high-performance team. You will find exercises and assessment tools as well as theory on how to build and maintain an effective team. Each chapter provides examples and ideas that you can readily put into practice.

CHAPTER 1: CHARACTERISTICS OF A HIGH-PERFORMANCE TEAM

I am sure that everyone in IT would like to be part of a high-performance team. This chapter outlines for you:

• The characteristics of teams that succeed.

• The benefits of teamwork.

• The role of the team leader.

It also provides you with a diagnostic tool to rate your current team performance.

A team or a group?

IT professionals are often viewed as working in isolation. People who are not in the profession can view them as seeming to prefer the company of themselves and their computers and other electronic devices to that of...

Table of contents

• Building a High-Performance Team