When thinking of a successful high performance team, everybody has an image that comes to mind. When thinking of a high-performance team, it is easy to overlook the idea of how that team was established. Building a high-performance team is no easy task. There are many key elements that are necessary to the success of a team. It is essential that all high-performance teams have an effective and talented leader, build the team with the correct counterparts, and have a difficult challenge that the team must face. Without any of these key elements, it would be detrimental to the team.
Without an effective and talented leader, a team cannot be expected to perform at a high level. No matter what the context or situation is in a story of a successful leader, people are drawn to them. A successful leader’s ability to make the right decisions draws us to their stories and motivates us to emulate what they do. In the article, How Successful Leaders Think, by Roger Martin in the Harvard Business Review, he points out that the best way to mimic these select few leaders is to focus less on exactly what they do or how they do it, but to focus on how these people think.
Roger Martin first begins by saying that the idea of studying how successful leaders think isn’t a new one; it has been around for years. He quotes the renowned American novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”, this passage accurately describes the sign of a truly intelligent individual. Rogers has come to agree with this idea after over a decade of being a management consultant and being the dean of a business school. Having interviewed droves of prospective employees and students, he noticed what set them apart was this inane ability to hold two opposing ideas in their head and resolve the tension between the two in a creative way, spawning a new one that contains both ideas in part, but being more effective than both.
This way of thinking is called integrative thinking; this opposes the thought process that most people practice, which is conventional thinking. Martin compares this ability to having opposable thumbs, being able to manipulate things the way we want to unlike the rest of the animal kingdom. We all have “opposable minds,” but don’t all know how to manipulate and fit together opposing ideas like these successful leaders do.
Successful leaders generate solutions to situations that are new, complex, and not recognized. They make what the class textbook, Organizational Behavior, by Jason A. Colquitt, Jeffery A. Lepine, and Michael J. Wesson, refers to as “non-programmed decisions.” They call for the use of a rational decision-making model and Rogers provides his own version of this while comparing how conventional thinkers might approach situations. First, an integrative thinker would seek out less obvious but potentially applicable factors as opposed to a conventional thinker who only sees what is most obvious. Second, they would bypass the one-way, “A produces B” relationships, and determine the nonlinear and less obvious connections between the opposing ideas. He or she would then go about seeing the problem as a whole and analyzing how the different parts come together and how each one affects the other instead of separating it into sections, working piece by piece. The fourth and final step is achieving resolution by producing a new and better idea while creatively easing tension between the opposing ideas. This approach is much better than just choosing one idea as right or wrong and settling for the best of the obvious options.
Working in a high performance team there will always be opposing ideas between members. Most leaders don’t even realize that they have a disposition towards integrative thinking and do it naturally. Eventually, often times they emerge as the head of a group because they’re able to take their team’s different ideas, put them together, and form a better one rather than singling a single idea out. This keeps all members not only happy, but feeling like they’ve contributed to the resolution, even when their idea wasn’t exactly the solution but was a part of it. Without a strong team leader, a team’s success is nearly impossible.
A strong leader is a key element to a successful team, but the group members also take a huge part in the team’s performance. In any successful team, it is the members and their contributions that separate their group from the rest. Lisa J. Daniels and Charles R. Davis break down the perfect elements to building a strong team in the article, What Makes High-Performance Teams Excel. They state that there are many parts to a high-performing team that are vital to the accomplishment of their goals. The underlying message from the article is that a strong team needs a strong leader, diversity, and cohesiveness.
Daniels and Davis claim that a strong leader is extremely important to a team functioning well. The leader’s has multiple tasks that they must reach in order to be considered an effective leader. It states in What Makes High-Performance Teams, Daniels and Davis claim that a leader must build strong interpersonal relationships, reach corporate deadlines and standards, and assign people to the correct roles depending on their strengths. The leader must be able to know all members of their team and know how to motivate them to work their hardest. At times, this can be difficult when having to constantly make sure that corporate policies and deadlines are met. The group represents a larger corporation who they represent. It is the leader’s job to make sure that there is a balance between relationships and policies. It is vital that the leadership selects the correct group members for the right tasks. This cannot be stressed enough; leaders need to allow team members to work towards their strengths. With a group all working to reach a certain, difficult task; it can be done much easier if everybody does their part well.
In the article, What Makes High-Performance Teams, Daniels and Davis’s second point that is essential to a team is diversity. When referring to team diversity, the term goes much further than obvious differences among people. Team diversity refers to the different characteristics that individual group members hold. In the class textbook, Organizational Behavior, by Jason A. Colquitt, Jeffery A. Lepine, and Michael J. Wesson, the value in diversity problem-solving approach is discussed. It states that having a larger pool of knowledge from experts from all different type of fields can be much more successful than a group of people who are similar.
The final key element that Daniels and David mention is cohesiveness. There are many steps to a team being cohesive; they must communicate well, be well coordinated and get along with one another. Teams must be able to communicate and be on the same page with one another. Also, teams must be well coordinated so everybody has the same idea of what is being done or what needs to be done. Finally, the article mentions team members getting along. This is a huge part of a group working well together. When emotions happen, it is much harder to obtain a goal.
In order for a team to reach its maximum potential and accomplishing a goal, they must be presented with a task that sufficiently challenges them. In his article, Building High-Performance Teams, Harvey Dubin explains that a challenge can act as a catalyst for creating a successful team. When a task is not easily accomplished, team members are forced to get creative and find the best solutions to problems they expect to face. This can help the team reach a higher level of success than they would have otherwise.
Unexpected misfortunes can also be used to increase team performance. With regard to the business world, Dubin suggests that teams should “embrace resistance and setbacks, forcing them to consider and implement new ways of developing and testing their product.” By adopting this ideology, teams can achieve their goals in ways they may not have normally considered. It also helps teams members handle the frustration that comes with unfortunate surprises. A team leader can re-brand their misfortune as an opportunity to be exploited.
Once a team has recovered from setbacks, often times their members find they work better together. Dealing with difficult situations forces team members to rely on each other for assistance. When members learn to ask for and accept help from one another, team performance can become much for efficient. Teams learn to trust each other and work better as a unit. This kind of cooperation between team members is hard to train, but can become a huge asset if it forms. This is why proper challenges and difficulty are required to help teams develop the required trust.
Risk is another topic that Dubin thinks teams should embrace. He points out that most risky situations often come with high rewards. If a team is confident the rewards will be worth the extra risk, they should not hesitate to seize the moment. The expression “Fortune Favors the Bold” seems a fitting summary of Dubin's reasoning behind his support of taking risk. In the business world, teams can become accustom to “playing it safe” and just trying to do slightly better each quarter. Good consistent results can keep a company stable and please investors. If a team can take a larger risk, and prevail, they will not only reap the rewards but also attract others to join them.
Using challenge, difficulty, and risk to your advantage is not a onetime thing either. Dubin says that “building high-performance teams starts with near term wins, but the returns continue for the long term.” Once you team begins to embrace challenge it will become contagious and spread through the organization. The effect will outlive the team’s original effort.
When thinking about a high-performance team, it is easy to overlook how difficult it truly is to create an effective team. With the use of strong leadership from a talented leader, the correct counterparts that build the team, and having a difficult challenge to face, a team is guaranteed to succeed in achieving its ultimate goal.
Without an effective and talented leader, a team cannot be expected to perform at a high level. No matter what the context or situation is in a story of a successful leader, people are drawn to them. A successful leader’s ability to make the right decisions draws us to their stories and motivates us to emulate what they do. In the article, How Successful Leaders Think, by Roger Martin in the Harvard Business Review, he points out that the best way to mimic these select few leaders is to focus less on exactly what they do or how they do it, but to focus on how these people think.
Roger Martin first begins by saying that the idea of studying how successful leaders think isn’t a new one; it has been around for years. He quotes the renowned American novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”, this passage accurately describes the sign of a truly intelligent individual. Rogers has come to agree with this idea after over a decade of being a management consultant and being the dean of a business school. Having interviewed droves of prospective employees and students, he noticed what set them apart was this inane ability to hold two opposing ideas in their head and resolve the tension between the two in a creative way, spawning a new one that contains both ideas in part, but being more effective than both.
This way of thinking is called integrative thinking; this opposes the thought process that most people practice, which is conventional thinking. Martin compares this ability to having opposable thumbs, being able to manipulate things the way we want to unlike the rest of the animal kingdom. We all have “opposable minds,” but don’t all know how to manipulate and fit together opposing ideas like these successful leaders do.
Successful leaders generate solutions to situations that are new, complex, and not recognized. They make what the class textbook, Organizational Behavior, by Jason A. Colquitt, Jeffery A. Lepine, and Michael J. Wesson, refers to as “non-programmed decisions.” They call for the use of a rational decision-making model and Rogers provides his own version of this while comparing how conventional thinkers might approach situations. First, an integrative thinker would seek out less obvious but potentially applicable factors as opposed to a conventional thinker who only sees what is most obvious. Second, they would bypass the one-way, “A produces B” relationships, and determine the nonlinear and less obvious connections between the opposing ideas. He or she would then go about seeing the problem as a whole and analyzing how the different parts come together and how each one affects the other instead of separating it into sections, working piece by piece. The fourth and final step is achieving resolution by producing a new and better idea while creatively easing tension between the opposing ideas. This approach is much better than just choosing one idea as right or wrong and settling for the best of the obvious options.
Working in a high performance team there will always be opposing ideas between members. Most leaders don’t even realize that they have a disposition towards integrative thinking and do it naturally. Eventually, often times they emerge as the head of a group because they’re able to take their team’s different ideas, put them together, and form a better one rather than singling a single idea out. This keeps all members not only happy, but feeling like they’ve contributed to the resolution, even when their idea wasn’t exactly the solution but was a part of it. Without a strong team leader, a team’s success is nearly impossible.
A strong leader is a key element to a successful team, but the group members also take a huge part in the team’s performance. In any successful team, it is the members and their contributions that separate their group from the rest. Lisa J. Daniels and Charles R. Davis break down the perfect elements to building a strong team in the article, What Makes High-Performance Teams Excel. They state that there are many parts to a high-performing team that are vital to the accomplishment of their goals. The underlying message from the article is that a strong team needs a strong leader, diversity, and cohesiveness.
Daniels and Davis claim that a strong leader is extremely important to a team functioning well. The leader’s has multiple tasks that they must reach in order to be considered an effective leader. It states in What Makes High-Performance Teams, Daniels and Davis claim that a leader must build strong interpersonal relationships, reach corporate deadlines and standards, and assign people to the correct roles depending on their strengths. The leader must be able to know all members of their team and know how to motivate them to work their hardest. At times, this can be difficult when having to constantly make sure that corporate policies and deadlines are met. The group represents a larger corporation who they represent. It is the leader’s job to make sure that there is a balance between relationships and policies. It is vital that the leadership selects the correct group members for the right tasks. This cannot be stressed enough; leaders need to allow team members to work towards their strengths. With a group all working to reach a certain, difficult task; it can be done much easier if everybody does their part well.
In the article, What Makes High-Performance Teams, Daniels and Davis’s second point that is essential to a team is diversity. When referring to team diversity, the term goes much further than obvious differences among people. Team diversity refers to the different characteristics that individual group members hold. In the class textbook, Organizational Behavior, by Jason A. Colquitt, Jeffery A. Lepine, and Michael J. Wesson, the value in diversity problem-solving approach is discussed. It states that having a larger pool of knowledge from experts from all different type of fields can be much more successful than a group of people who are similar.
The final key element that Daniels and David mention is cohesiveness. There are many steps to a team being cohesive; they must communicate well, be well coordinated and get along with one another. Teams must be able to communicate and be on the same page with one another. Also, teams must be well coordinated so everybody has the same idea of what is being done or what needs to be done. Finally, the article mentions team members getting along. This is a huge part of a group working well together. When emotions happen, it is much harder to obtain a goal.
In order for a team to reach its maximum potential and accomplishing a goal, they must be presented with a task that sufficiently challenges them. In his article, Building High-Performance Teams, Harvey Dubin explains that a challenge can act as a catalyst for creating a successful team. When a task is not easily accomplished, team members are forced to get creative and find the best solutions to problems they expect to face. This can help the team reach a higher level of success than they would have otherwise.
Unexpected misfortunes can also be used to increase team performance. With regard to the business world, Dubin suggests that teams should “embrace resistance and setbacks, forcing them to consider and implement new ways of developing and testing their product.” By adopting this ideology, teams can achieve their goals in ways they may not have normally considered. It also helps teams members handle the frustration that comes with unfortunate surprises. A team leader can re-brand their misfortune as an opportunity to be exploited.
Once a team has recovered from setbacks, often times their members find they work better together. Dealing with difficult situations forces team members to rely on each other for assistance. When members learn to ask for and accept help from one another, team performance can become much for efficient. Teams learn to trust each other and work better as a unit. This kind of cooperation between team members is hard to train, but can become a huge asset if it forms. This is why proper challenges and difficulty are required to help teams develop the required trust.
Risk is another topic that Dubin thinks teams should embrace. He points out that most risky situations often come with high rewards. If a team is confident the rewards will be worth the extra risk, they should not hesitate to seize the moment. The expression “Fortune Favors the Bold” seems a fitting summary of Dubin's reasoning behind his support of taking risk. In the business world, teams can become accustom to “playing it safe” and just trying to do slightly better each quarter. Good consistent results can keep a company stable and please investors. If a team can take a larger risk, and prevail, they will not only reap the rewards but also attract others to join them.
Using challenge, difficulty, and risk to your advantage is not a onetime thing either. Dubin says that “building high-performance teams starts with near term wins, but the returns continue for the long term.” Once you team begins to embrace challenge it will become contagious and spread through the organization. The effect will outlive the team’s original effort.
When thinking about a high-performance team, it is easy to overlook how difficult it truly is to create an effective team. With the use of strong leadership from a talented leader, the correct counterparts that build the team, and having a difficult challenge to face, a team is guaranteed to succeed in achieving its ultimate goal.