The discipline of teams katzenbach pdf

Although the team option promises greater performance, it also brings more risk, and managers must be brutally honest in assessing the trade-offs. Members may have to overcome a natural reluctance to trust their fate to others. The price of faking the team approach is high: at best, members get diverted from their individual goals, costs outweigh benefits, and people resent the imposition on their time and priorities; at worst, serious animosities develop that undercut even the potential personal bests of the working-group approach.

Working groups present fewer risks. Effective working groups need little time to shape their purpose since the leader usually establishes it. Meetings are run against well-prioritized agendas. And decisions are implemented through specific individual assignments and accountabilities. Most of the time, therefore, if performance aspirations can be met through individuals doing their respective jobs well, the working-group approach is more comfortable, less risky, and less disruptive than trying for more elusive team performance levels.

Indeed, if there is no performance need for the team approach, efforts spent to improve the effectiveness of the working group make much more sense than floundering around trying to become a team. Although there is no guaranteed how-to recipe for building team performance, we observed a number of approaches shared by many successful teams. Establish urgency, demanding performance standards, and direction. All team members need to believe the team has urgent and worthwhile purposes, and they want to know what the expectations are.

Indeed, the more urgent and meaningful the rationale, the more likely it is that the team will live up to its performance potential, as was the case for a customer-service team that was told that further growth for the entire company would be impossible without major improvements in that area.

Teams work best in a compelling context. That is why companies with strong performance ethics usually form teams readily. Select members for skill and skill potential, not personality. No team succeeds without all the skills needed to meet its purpose and performance goals. Yet most teams figure out the skills they will need after they are formed. The wise manager will choose people both for their existing skills and their potential to improve existing skills and learn new ones.

Pay particular attention to first meetings and actions. Initial impressions always mean a great deal. When potential teams first gather, everyone monitors the signals given by others to confirm, suspend, or dispel assumptions and concerns. They pay particular attention to those in authority: the team leader and any executives who set up, oversee, or otherwise influence the team. And, as always, what such leaders do is more important than what they say.

If a senior executive leaves the team kickoff to take a phone call ten minutes after the session has begun and he never returns, people get the message. Set some clear rules of behavior. All effective teams develop rules of conduct at the outset to help them achieve their purpose and performance goals. Set and seize upon a few immediate performance-oriented tasks and goals. Most effective teams trace their advancement to key performance-oriented events. Such events can be set in motion by immediately establishing a few challenging goals that can be reached early on.

There is no such thing as a real team without performance results, so the sooner such results occur, the sooner the team congeals. Challenge the group regularly with fresh facts and information. New information causes a team to redefine and enrich its understanding of the performance challenge, thereby helping the team shape a common purpose, set clearer goals, and improve its common approach.

Conversely, teams err when they assume that all the information needed exists in the collective experience and knowledge of their members. Spend lots of time together. Common sense tells us that team members must spend a lot of time together, scheduled and unscheduled, especially in the beginning. Indeed, creative insights as well as personal bonding require impromptu and casual interactions just as much as analyzing spreadsheets and interviewing customers.

Busy executives and managers too often intentionally minimize the time they spend together. This time need not always be spent together physically; electronic, fax, and phone time can also count as time spent together. Exploit the power of positive feedback, recognition, and reward. Positive reinforcement works as well in a team context as elsewhere. There are many ways to recognize and reward team performance beyond direct compensation, from having a senior executive speak directly to the team about the urgency of its mission to using awards to recognize contributions.

Ultimately, however, the satisfaction shared by a team in its own performance becomes the most cherished reward. Having said that, we believe the extra level of performance teams can achieve is becoming critical for a growing number of companies, especially as they move through major changes during which company performance depends on broad-based behavioral change.

When top management uses teams to run things, it should make sure the team succeeds in identifying specific purposes and goals. This is a second major issue for teams that run things. Too often, such teams confuse the broad mission of the total organization with the specific purpose of their small group at the top. The discipline of teams tells us that for a real team to form there must be a team purpose that is distinctive and specific to the small group and that requires its members to roll up their sleeves and accomplish something beyond individual end-products.

If a group of managers looks only at the economic performance of the part of the organization it runs to assess overall effectiveness, the group will not have any team performance goals of its own. While the basic discipline of teams does not differ for them, teams at the top are certainly the most difficult.

The complexities of long-term challenges, heavy demands on executive time, and the deep-seated individualism of senior people conspire against teams at the top. At the same time, teams at the top are the most powerful. At first we thought such teams were nearly impossible.

That is because we were looking at the teams as defined by the formal organizational structure, that is, the leader and all his or her direct reports equals the team. They were mostly twos and threes, with an occasional fourth. Nonetheless, real teams at the top of large, complex organizations are still few and far between. As understandable as these assumptions may be, most of them are unwarranted.

They do not apply to the teams at the top we have observed, and when replaced with more realistic and flexible assumptions that permit the team discipline to be applied, real team performance at the top can and does occur.

Moreover, as more and more companies are confronted with the need to manage major change across their organizations, we will see more real teams at the top. We believe that teams will become the primary unit of performance in high-performance organizations. But that does not mean that teams will crowd out individual opportunity or formal hierarchy and process.

Rather, teams will enhance existing structures without replacing them. A team opportunity exists anywhere hierarchy or organizational boundaries inhibit the skills and perspectives needed for optimal results. Thus, new-product innovation requires preserving functional excellence through structure while eradicating functional bias through teams. And frontline productivity requires preserving direction and guidance through hierarchy while drawing on energy and flexibility through self-managing teams.

The critical role for senior managers, therefore, is to worry about company performance and the kinds of teams that can deliver it. By doing so, top management creates the kind of environment that enables team as well as individual and organizational performance.

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Create an account to read 2 more. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Once the essential discipline has been established, a team is free to concentrate on the critical challenges it faces: For a team whose purpose is to make recommendations, that means making a fast and constructive start and providing a clean handoff to those who will implement the recommendations.

Teams at the top are the most difficult but also the most powerful. Read more on Teams or related topics Collaboration and teams , Managing people and Strategy execution. For HBR Subscribers. Jon R. Katzenbach is a founder and co-leader of the Katzenbach Center at PwC, which focuses on cultural and leadership joint research within client situations.

Douglas K. Want to see the other articles in this list? Subscribe Now I'm already a subscriber. Forgot Password? I'm a subscriber, but I don't have an HBR. Unfortunately, that means we have to temporarily suspend subscriber syncing. We apologize for the inconvenience. Enter your subscriber email address. We need a little more information to find your subscription.

Continue I want to try again with a different email address. Need help getting access? Have questions? See our subscription FAQ. A working group relies on the individual contributions of its members for group performance. But a team strives for something greater than its members could achieve individually.

In short, an effective team is always worth more than the sum of its parts. Katzenbach and Smith identify three basic types of teams: teams that recommend things--task forces or project groups; teams that make or do things--manufacturing, operations, or marketing groups; and teams that run things--groups that oversee some significant functional activity.

For managers, the key is knowing where in the organization real teams should be encouraged. Team potential exists anywhere hierarchy or organizational boundaries inhibit good performance. Nor do teamwork values alone ensure team performance. So what is a team? How can managers know when the team option makes…. Get access to this material, plus much more with a free Educator Account:. Already registered? Sign in. How can managers know when the team option makes sense, and what can they do to ensure team success?

In this groundbreaking March article, authors Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith answer these questions and outline the discipline that defines a real team. The essence of a team is shared commitment.

Without it, groups perform as individuals; with it, they become a powerful unit of collective performance. The best teams invest a tremendous amount of time shaping a purpose that they can own. They also translate their purpose into specific performance goals.