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Master Your Game: High Performance Teams

Written by: Jacque Small

Article Overview: Many organizations talk about teams and teamwork but few really know how nor take the time to build teams. This article is the first in a series about teamwork. It explains the difference between a group and a team and outlines how dynamic teams lead to future success and growth.

Master Your Game: High Performance Teams

Many organizations talk about teams and teamwork but few really know how nor take the time to build teams. This article is the first in a series about teamwork. It explains the difference between a group and a team and outlines how dynamic teams lead to future success and growth.

Groups Are a Collection of Individuals

"There is a simplistic concept that if you select and put 6 to 12 people in a room, you have a team; what you really have is just a 'group' of individuals."
G. Gibson and C. Smith in
Dynamic Coaching to Build Dynamic Teams
How many times have you decided not to contribute to meeting discussions because:

• you did not know if you had the right answer
• you did not understand what others were talking about
• you were tired of listening to others and have tuned out
• you believed no one listens to you anyway
• you feel it is not worth getting into an argument?

If you do not feel like participating in meeting discussions for any number of reasons, chances are that you belong to a group, not a team. If you are worried about "you" rather than the collective, you are not a team member. If you do not feel motivated to participate in discussions, you don't belong to a compelling environment that encourages open, honest communication -- in other words, you do not belong to a team.

Groups, like teams, are a collection of individuals that have come together to meet on a regular basis. Often when individuals come into these meetings, each has her or his own priorities and agendas. Regardless of the specific purpose that brings them together, it is how individuals behave that sets apart groups from teams.


Team Members Leave Their Egos at the Door

To be a highly effective team member, you will have to leave your ego at the door when you enter the meeting. A team meeting is about accomplishing the common goal and working together - not competing - to achieve the desired outcome.
R. Maddux, author of Team Building: An Exercise in Leadership describes the qualities of groups and teams as follows:

Groups
• Individuals work independently
• Distrust and disagreement
• Unclear communication
• Conflict avoided or escalated
• Conformity
• Self focused, hidden agendas, ownership

Teams
• Members are interdependent
• Openness, trust; disagreements seen as positive
• Open honest communication
• Recognize value of conflict
• Free expression
• Mutual goals, purpose, mission, sense of unity

If focusing on mutual goals, purpose and mission is the objective, teams clearly have an advantage over groups.

Dynamic Teams Lead to Success

With each member contributing, the collective team energy is laser-focused on achieving the shared goal. Each one works harder to have open and honest communication, resulting in cumulative knowledge that leads to better decisions, a synergy that generates creative outcomes or "extraordinary results".

Dynamic teams bring out the differences of opinion and encourage the respectful exploration of these differences to determine what would work best for the team. The brilliance of teams is demonstrated by the creative and innovative generation of ideas and outcomes.

Here's another argument for fostering high performance teams: The future success of our organizations and our economy will depend upon our ability to be creative and harness the intellectual capital of people's ingenuity. Perhaps Dr. Martha Piper, the University of British Columbia president best explains:

". . . knowledge on its own has very little use - that indeed we need people - people who can use the information and knowledge in an innovative way - people who can create the new knowledge and the products and services that flow from it - people, who, for want of a better term, are creative."

Teams with effective communication can operationalize this creativity, and in turn, contribute to our future economic success.

Building Dynamic Teams,

Jacque Small

Related Articles
  Master Your Game: Introduction
  The Hole in The Sum of The Parts
  Master Your Game: Foundation of High Performance Teams - Part 2
  Matching Team Types and Focus
  Does your game face need a face lift

Article Tags: clarity, focus, high performance, performance teams, teamwork, vision



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