Teams

What it does:
Benefits the entire organization by maximizing the quality and quantity of work that can be achieved by its workforce. Leads to more creative thinking, better problem-solving and increased worker satisfaction.

Its other names:
Multifunctional teams

Where it comes from:
Teams had been around for some time before 1992, when Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, two McKinsey consultants, wrote The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization (Harvard Business School Press). Nonetheless, their book became the catalyst that moved teams to the center of American management thinking in the mid-1990s.

Summary:
People work in groups in any organization. However, not all work groups are teams. What elevates a work group to team efficiency? Katzenbach and Smith define these critical characteristics:

- A team is small in number.
- Members have complementary skills.
- Everyone works toward a clearly defined and shared purpose.
- A team has shared performance goals supported by individual tasks.
- A team employs common methodologies.
- Members are accountable to each other, not only to themselves.
- Team leadership is not hierarchical - everyone is encouraged to think, plan, contribute and act.
- A team is not open-ended, but created to address a particular issue or need.

Above all, teams accomplish notable results. If that is not the case, then one of the above characteristics of true teams is missing.

What else you need to know:
Despite the fact that teams are not hierarchical in structure, it takes a skilled manager to make sure they stay on track. Since the publication of The Wisdom of Teams, some effective strategies for accomplishing this have evolved, including:

- Rotating the leadership of teams.
- Breaking teams down into working sub-units of two or three people who work together to accomplish short-term sub-goals.
- Bringing team members into the process for only the time when their specific skills are demanded by the work of the team - then releasing them for other tasks where their skills will provide more benefit.
- Reconvening a team periodically for a year or more after its work is completed for follow-up and analysis of ongoing results. (Are the systems they put into place still working?)
- Asking "what went right?" in addition to "what went wrong?" so that continuous improvement results from the team experience.