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Teams are made up of individuals. So it’s easy to think if you get the best individuals on the team – the smartest, quickest and most decisive – you will have the best team. But, of course, it doesn’t work that way, as any sports fan knows. It’s a combination of talents and chemistry that works.
But what’s that mixture for your workplace – for your teams?
Organizational behaviour professor Vanessa Urch Druskat’s research found that high-performing teams set in place the social and emotional conditions for an effective team culture. There’s an underpinning of norms, habits, routines and rituals that influence team members’ motivation, behaviour and interactions.
“Teams are systems, which means that the quality of member interactions, not the talents or characteristics of individuals, determines success. Patterns of the right kinds of interactions motivate members to make the best use of their skills,” she writes in The Emotionally Intelligent Team.
She outlines nine norms that productive teams need, which can be divided into three clusters of team interactions: How to help one another succeed, how to learn and advance together and how to engage the stakeholders.
Cluster one is the starting point, allowing you to build a supportive community among your team members. It includes three essentials: Understanding your teammates, demonstrating caring and addressing unacceptable behaviours. In each case, you must decide what measures to put in place for your specific team to ensure this element continues long term.
Cluster two focuses on team performance and goal achievement. You need to develop guidelines for spending time reviewing the team, supporting individual expression, building optimism and solving problems proactively rather than reactively.
No team is an island and cluster three urges you to think beyond your members. You need to understand the team’s context – building awareness, asking questions and listening to what’s on the mind of relevant decision-makers – and develop external relationships.
There’s a hierarchy for implementation. While it may be tempting to start with an aspect that feels unfamiliar to you or that you know is weak, she encourages you to focus initially on cluster one – and, indeed, its very first norm, understanding team members. You may feel there isn’t much need for improvement on that score – everyone seems to get along – and some members may feel relationship development is a waste of time. But she insists even minimal time spent building relationships will benefit everyone. Proceed through the other norms in cluster one and similarly go through the other clusters in order.
Rather than a system, consultant Mark Murphy sees teams as a collection of people with distinct, diverse roles and talents. In your favourite rock band, the band members don’t play identical instruments and share carbon-copy personalities. There’s a mixture, but certain elements are essential.
For the teams in your office, his training and research company has found you need people to fill these five critical roles:
- The director, who assumes a leadership role within the team, guiding its course and making important, difficult, and even unpopular decisions. Directors are decisive. They want decisions made – yesterday.
- The achiever, who immerses themself in the details of accomplishing tasks and getting things done. Steve Wozniak, who started Apple with Steve Jobs, served in this role. He had a hands-on mentality and was committed to excellence.
- The stabilizer, who keeps the team on track with meticulous planning, processes and procedures. They ensure clear timelines and organization. “Psychologically, stabilizers tend to have high levels of conscientiousness, attention to detail and a strong need for order and structure,” Mr. Murphy writes in Team Players. “Cognitively, stabilizers excel in systemic thinking and have a strong capacity for long-term planning.”
- The harmonizer, who brings collaboration and camaraderie, building relationships and resolving conflicts. They usually have high emotional intelligence and empathy, and are driven by a strong need for social connection and group cohesion. They can anticipate potential conflicts, mediate disagreements and promote understanding.
- The trailblazer, who brings innovation, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking along with the courage to challenge conventional wisdom. Their ability to think differently makes them highly valuable when the team requires developing new solutions to complex problems. But Mr. Murphy warns in certain situations they can knock a team off-kilter and divert its energies from one wild goose chase to another.
The five roles aren’t formal jobs, and people might switch roles at different points; you may fit different roles on different teams. You can have more than one person in each role but need to cultivate a sensible balance.
Great teams have someone in every role. “It’s tough to be successful without each of these talents being represented,” he says. The worst teams in his study tended not to fill every role. Even when they were all filled, the distribution was markedly disproportionate in weaker teams, stacked with directors and therefore locked in power struggles over the best path forward or so many achievers buried in their own work there was little collaboration.
Building teams is not easy, as we all know. These two approaches might help you refine your thinking and approach.
Cannonballs
- Diaper Genies are great for the home but not for your office if it means trying to seal away discomfort to keep things clean, argue consultants Karin Hurt and David Dye. An unspoken pact to avoid conflict can wreck your team.
- To ensure she was getting truthful feedback about the company from her team, Deb Liu, when chief executive officer of the Ancestry genealogy company, began to hold “magic wand dinners,” in which everyone at the table would share one thing they’d change if they had a magic wand about the company, the culture or the product. It became a place for honest conversation, where problems could be fixed and ideas thrown out that became successful products.
- When you hold on to tasks and refuse to delegate, you steal growth from others, warns executive coach Dan Rockwell. He insists “delegation says ‘I trust you.’”
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.