In the current business climate of disruption, uncertainty, and historically high inflation, organizations are looking to make innovative improvements, boost output, and trim cost–all at the same time. They’re counting on their teams to get it done; and in many cases, leaders are more and more disappointed by their teams’ performance.
When we read success stories of high performing teams, they are characterized by certain attributes: they meet or exceed challenging goals, they improve morale and reduce employee churn, and members hold each other accountable.
Why don’t more of our teams measure up? Although there are many contributing reasons, three stand out.
Many, if not most, “teams” are just departmental work groups with a “team” label.
Leaders’ frustrations with the lack of team performance is partly due to the fact that we are expecting team performance from work groups. These work groups were designed around the departmental function; performance focuses on efficient execution of tasks and activities, and relationships and performance management is still one-to-one (leader to employee) rather than team-based. These are work groups—groups of employees aligned around departments. They can function effectively through communication and coordination with other work groups. And within the work group, members keep each other informed so that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. Most of the groups we call teams do not have the communication and collaboration needed for real team function, and many are not structured optimally to become true high-performing teams (but COULD be). Aligning departmental work groups effectively can result in smoother, more efficient operations and an overall better place to work.
There is nothing wrong with work groups; they can accomplish tasks and activities very efficiently and demonstrate teamwork and collaboration, so the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. Some work groups could become very effective teams. It all depends on what leadership wants. Does the organization want teams? Or does it just want better teamwork?
Work groups can be very effective. For example, one client organization wanted to implement cross-functional work teams throughout its entire North Carolina site. For most of the processes across the site, restructuring into cross functional teams made sense and brought significant improvement. However, there was one departmental work group in the organization that had such high customer satisfaction scores for both internal and external customers, I strongly recommended that the restructuring effort leave that group alone, other than minor changes to cross-functional communications.
In order to become a team, the members need to complete team “contracting,” chartering, or Team Basics, so that each team has forged an agreement on its mission, goals, and ground rules for how it is going to get the work done. (This would be Step One if you’re hoping for mutual accountability within the team.) It understands how it will be measured and how those measurements contribute to the organization’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Whether forming work teams, project teams, tasks forces, etc., I prefer cross functional teams, and I have helped many clients restructure their teams from departmental to cross functional—not just temporary teams or project teams, but also the day to day work teams. Forming teams across processes where the true interdependencies lie is inherently and naturally more effective than forming teams within artificial boundaries. Departmental work teams can engrain finger pointing and blaming between functions when we need to be breaking down barriers. In fact, some departmental teams make improvements that actually make the process worse for others in the process.
The group’s purpose or performance challenge does not require “teaming.”
True teams are given a purpose that requires them to team. The team cannot accomplish the purpose by acting as a work group as it has in the past. The performance challenge given to the team needs to be so challenging that a higher level of collaboration is required.
In one organization work groups were told they are now “self directed work teams” and their purpose was to “run the jobs” in their part of the organization. In holding initial conversations with employees, I kept hearing, “We’ve been running the jobs all along. What did those people in corporate think we were doing?” This performance challenge did not require team behavior. Once every group became a continuous improvement team with more challenging goals and measures, the organization started to see more team behaviors and performance.
Lack of clear empowerment parameters, expectations, and measures.
In your organization, when a team started up, when (hopefully) leadership provided each team with a strong performance challenge, did it also provide empowerment parameters, so the team knows exactly what is in its purview and what is not? Empowerment parameters can include information related to how far can the team go with experimentation, who are key stakeholders to keep in the loop, resources for the team, how the team will be measured, decision making expectations for the teams, etc. Whom does the team report to? Is the team a recommending team, a decision-making team, or somewhere in between? How does the team’s mission and performance expectations fit into the overall process, structure, and KPI’s of the organization? What resources will the team have? What training? How will group or team interactions differ from common practices of the past? How does each individual team member’s performance expectations evolve from those team KPIs to ensure that all team members do their fair share of the work?
By making a few uncomplicated changes in these three areas, any organization can improve work group function, team function, or implement high performance teams. The result will be improved operational performance, better employee morale, and reduced employee churn.
For a complimentary, 60-minute brainstorming session to help your organization improve team and operational performance, please contact me or message me in LinkedIn.