“Most organizational work is attacked through work groups or various types of teams.”
This statement opens an early chapter in the recent Harvard Business Essentials book, Creating Teams with an Edge, although it is obviously not a groundbreaking statement.
Teams are probably fundamental to your work, whether you are a small-business owner or part of a Fortune 500 corporation. According to a 2007 study on teams and their role on organizational development and effectiveness, the Center for Creative Leadership (State of Teams, 2007) found…
91% of respondents stated that “teams are central to our organizational success”
95% said that people within their organization participate on more than one team at a time
Participants were mid-upper management or executive-level leaders at organizations that spanned diverse industries from healthcare to government to automotive. With this level of pervasiveness and importance, critical questions need to be answered:
How do you lead good teams to become great?
How do you know if your organization is most effectively using teams?
How can you accentuate individual strengths in order to build strong team dynamics?
Where do teams find their vision and how can they keep that vision?
These are complex, multilayered questions that hit at overarching elements of the way individuals work and organizations function.
But in order to answer them, there are ground-level aspects of team performance that must first be addressed. [Team Development and Performance: Two Keys (2)]