Team effectiveness refers to more than meeting goals, though that is certainly one element. How the team reaches those goals is also important, because effectiveness includes elements such as resilience, sustained performance, interdependency, team culture, and psychological safety. A team model that creates an effective team leads to consistent results, engaged team members and team members who experience personal well-being, a sense of belonging, and an understanding of how their contributions contribute to organizational success. There are different team models, but they all have basic elements at their core. Google’s re:work project, conducted by the Project Aristotle team, did an excellent study on what makes an effective team and the team behaviors that lead to high performance.
TEAM VS. WORK GROUP: GETTING DOWN TO BASICS
Managers lead teams, but how many have really thought about the difference between a team and a work group? A work group can consist mainly of employees doing independent work, meaning each individual does not have to coordinate with others to meet work goals. A team is a group of employees with a shared goal, so the work is interdependent. Teams are only sometimes determined by organizational structure nowadays, because there are cross-functional teams and teams consisting of internal employees and external members, such as a supplier. There are communities of excellence (CoE), communities of practice (CoP), specialist teams, project teams, department teams, innovation teams, and silo teams. Teams are also made up of people who work in different locations and geographies, utilizing various communication technologies to achieve team cohesion. There is not one ‘team’ in today’s organization. There are many teams, and they all should have one thing in common – effectiveness. Before discussing the model for team effectiveness, it is beneficial to understand the dysfunctions that hold teams back from being effective. In the book The FIVE DYSFUNCTIONS of a TEAM, Patrick Lencioni discusses the main characteristics of unhealthy teams. They are the absence of trust among team members, fear of conflict that leads to artificial harmony that stifles productive conflict, lack of clarity and/or buy-in that prevents solid decision-making, avoidance of accountability to avoid interpersonal discomfort, and inattention to results in which team members pursue individual goals and protect personal status.
ELEMENTS OF AN EFFECTIVE TEAM
The Google re:work project studied 180 teams in engineering and sales, and the teams were a mix of high and low-performing teams. The study evaluated four significant variables. One was group dynamics, which explored how safe team members felt expressing divergent opinions. The second evaluated skill sets that identified how good an employee felt about navigating roadblocks and barriers. A third set of variables was personality traits based on a Big Five personality assessment. The fourth area researchers analyzed was emotional intelligence, measured using the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire.
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