Teamwork is something that most of us have to engage in during our career. Given it’s prevalence and importance, we will be writing a series of articles that will provide lots of practical information for creating teams and maintaining effective teamwork.
We will cover a range of team related topics such as:
- What is a Team? The difference between a Team and a Work Group.
- Picking the Right Team.
- Stages of Team Development.
- Dysfunctions of a Team and over-coming them.
- Motivation - removing dissatisfaction factors and increasing Motivation.
- Team Charters.
- High Performance Teams.
To kick-off, let’s define and clearly spell out what a team is.
“A team is a group of individuals who work together to produce products or deliver services. Team members share goals and are mutually held accountable for meeting them, they are interdependent in their accomplishment, and they affect the results through their interactions with one another. Because the team is held collectively accountable, the work of integrating with one another is included among the responsibilities of each member.” - From: Designing Team-Based Organisations, Mohrman, Cohen and Mohrman (1995).
“A team is a small group of people with complementary skills and abilities who are committed to a common purpose, performance goal and approach for which they are mutually accountable.” - From ‘The Wisdom of Teams’, Katzenbach and Smith, HBR, March 1993.
There are 7 defining factors of a team. Teams:
- Share a common goal and approach.
- Are mutually accountable for delivering these goals.
- Are small in number.
- Work together.
- Are interdependent - they possess complementary skills and abilities.
- Interact – and this interaction has a direct bearing on results.
- Include integration with other team members as a responsibility.
If all of these factors are present, then you have a team. If not, then it’s not a real team. It is a workgroup, or something in-between a team and a workgroup.
The following table illustrates the difference between a team and a workgroup.
These distinctions may be overstated: for example, a group may have a specific purpose and a team’s effectiveness may not necessarily be directly assessed in terms of the collective work product. However, the main thing in distinguishing groups from teams is that in workgroups, the emphasis is on individual effort. People doing exactly the same job in an advice centre helping service users and being overseen by the same supervisor or manager, may be called a team, but they are in fact a working group.
A single-leader work-group is a good choice when:
- A project has to be implemented fast; and/or
- Can be easily broken up into individual efforts.
Teams are the better option when:
There is a performance need that can only be met through:
- Shared objectives.
- Genuine interdependency (including interaction and integration).
- Joint accountability.
Keeping all of this in mine, for starters, here are some things to think about:
- Are you working in a team or a work group?
- What is better for your department and type of work?
- If you’re in a work group but should be a team, what factors are getting in the way?
Stay tuned for future articles, in which we’ll look at best practices for forming and developing high performance teams.