Building and Leading High Performance Teams

Column by Chris Musselwhite

You don't have to be Michael Jordan or Mia Hamm to have the skills you need to build and lead high performing teams.

When a sports team is working well together, it can feel like magic. We've all experienced it, either as a team member or as a fan. Fortunately, you do not have to be Michael Jordan or Mia Hamm to have the skills you need to build and lead high performing teams in your organization.

An important leadership competency for any size organization, the ability to build and lead high performing teams is especially critical in small-to-midsize businesses. Here, people must work closely together, wear many hats and work effectively across the organization to get tasks accomplished quickly enough to remain competitive. vIn order to understand the competencies needed to build and lead high performance teams, it is helpful to first define a team. Here is a simple but effective description from The Wisdom of Teams (Harvard Business School Press, 1993.)

"A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable."

Using this definition, we can outline three important competencies for the effective team builder and leader.

Promoting understanding of why a group of people need to be a team. The team needs to understand its shared goals and what each team member brings to the team that is relevant and crucial to its overall successes.

Ensuring the team has adequate knowledge to accomplish its task. This includes information relevant to the team's goals and individual job competencies.

Facilitating effective interaction in such as way as to ensure good problem solving, decision making and coordination of effort.

Characteristics of Highly Effective Teams

To better understand how these competencies create effective teams, let's examine some characteristics of highly effective teams.

An effective team understands the big picture. In an effective team, each team member understands the context of the team's work to the greatest degree possible. That includes understanding the relevance of his or her job and how it impacts the effectiveness of others and the overall team effort. Too often, people are asked to work on part of a task without being told how their role contributes to the desired end result, much less how their efforts are impacting the ability of others to do their work. Understanding the big picture promotes collaboration, increases commitment and improves quality.

An effective team has common goals. Effective teams have agreed-upon goals that are simple, measurable and clearly relevant to the team's task. Each goal includes key measurable metrics (that are available to everyone on the team), which can be used to determine the team effectiveness and improvement. Understanding and working toward these common goals as a unit is crucial to the team's effectiveness.

An effective team works collaboratively, as a unit. In an effective team you'll notice a penchant for collaboration and a keen awareness of interdependency. Collaboration and a solid sense of interdependency in a team will defuse blaming behavior and stimulate opportunities for learning and improvement. Without this sense of interdependency in responsibility and reward, blaming behaviors can occur which will quickly erode team effectiveness.

The Roles of the Effective Team Leader

In order to encourage this level of collaboration and interdependency, the team leader must provide the necessary support and structure for the team, starting with putting together the right people. Team members should be selected and their tasks assigned with their natural skills in mind. Not every person is capable of doing every job.

The team must also have the resources and training required to develop the skills needed to do their jobs. This includes cross-training. Cross-training gives team members a greater awareness of how their jobs are interdependent, increasing the team's flexibility and improving response time.

The quality of the team's response is highly dependent on the timeliness of the feedback received from the team's leader, other team members and customers. Receiving timely feedback is crucial to the effectiveness of the team. The effective team leader ensures that feedback reaches the entire team on its goals and metrics, as well as feedback to each individual team member. This feedback must be received in time to make adjustments and corrections. Often, feedback is received too late to have any practical value in the moment, and consequently, it feels like criticism. While it might be useful for future planning, it does not promote immediate corrections in performance.

Feedback is a form of constructive communication, another necessary tool in the effective team leader's tool chest. No matter how traditional or innovative the work design, consistent and constructive communication throughout the team is essential. The act of constructive communication can do more than anything else to improve quality and productivity. Timely and appropriately delivered feedback can make the difference between a team that hides mistakes and a team that sees mistakes as opportunities.

When a team views mistakes as opportunities for improving the team's process and results, it's a sign that the team leader has successfully created an environment that promotes problem-solving. People are problem solvers by nature. When they are allowed to create their own solutions (rather than having expert solutions imposed upon them) team members are more proactive and engaged. Teams also have greater ownership of solutions they discover for themselves.

Creating an environment that promotes problem-solving is part of creating an effective team structure. Poor team structure can actually create negative, ineffective behaviors in individuals and impede communication. The responsibility for poor performance is usually a function of the team structure rather than individual incompetence; yet, it is individuals who are sent to human resources or training programs for fixing. If team members feel like they are pitted against one another to compete for rewards and recognition, they will withhold information that might be useful to the greater team. When a team has problems, the effective team leader will focus on the team's structure before focusing on individuals.

Conclusion

Remember: a "willingness" to participate collaboratively as a team member does not guarantee the desired outcome. People thrown into a collaborative situation, especially those without experience operating in this mode, need assistance to guarantee success. Managers who are skeptical of team participation to begin with often throw their people into an unplanned, unstructured decision-making process, responding with "I told you so" as they watch their team flounder.

By contrast, managers who focus on promoting good understanding, ensuring adequate knowledge and facilitating effective interaction, will watch the transformation of their job from one that required constant supervision, fire-fighting, and oversight, to one that allows the leader to focus on serving the needs of the team and each individual team member.

OBSTACLES ARE THE STEPPING STONES OF SUCCESS

by Harvey Mackay

A man was walking in the park one day when he came upon a cocoon with a small opening. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through the little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It looked like it had gotten as far as it could, so the man decided to help the butterfly. He used his pocketknife and snipped the remaining bit of the cocoon.

The butterfly then emerged easily, but something was strange. The butterfly had a swollen body and shriveled wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected at any moment the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened. In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and deformed wings. It was never able to fly.

What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to emerge was natural. It was nature's way of forcing fluid from its body into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom. Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our lives.

If we were allowed to go through life without any obstacles, we would be crippled. We would not be as strong as what we could have been. And we could never fly.

History has shown us that the most celebrated winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

My good friend, Lou Holtz, football coach of the University of South Carolina, once told me, "Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I'll show you someone who has overcome adversity."

Beethoven composed his greatest works after becoming deaf. George Washington was snowed in through a treacherous winter at Valley Forge. Abraham Lincoln was raised in poverty. Albert Einstein was called a slow learner, retarded and uneducable. If Christopher Columbus had turned back, no one could have blamed him, considering the constant adversity he endured.

As an elementary student, actor James Earl Jones (a.k.a. Darth Vader) stuttered so badly he communicated with friends and teachers using written notes.

Itzhak Perlman, the incomparable concert violinist, was born to parents who survived a Nazi concentration camp and has been paralyzed from the waist down since the age of four.

Chester Carlson, a young inventor, took his idea to 20 big corporations in the 1940s. After seven years of rejections, he was able to persuade Haloid, a small company in Rochester, N.Y., to purchase the rights to his electrostatic paper- copying process. Haloid has since become Xerox Corporation.

Thomas Edison tried over 2,000 experiments before he was able to get his light bulb to work. Upon being asked how he felt about failing so many times, he replied, "I never failed once. I invented the light bulb. It just happened to be a 2,000-step process."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected President of the United States for four terms, had been stricken with polio at the age of 39.

Persistence paid off for General Douglas MacArthur. After applying for admission to West Point twice, he applied a third time and was accepted. The rest is history.

In 1927 the head instructor of the John Murray Anderson Drama School, instructed student Lucille Ball, to "Try any other profession. Any other."

Buddy Holly was fired from the Decca record label in 1956 by Paul Cohen, Nashville "Artists and Repertoire Man." Cohen called Holly "the biggest no-talent I ever worked with."

Academy Award-winning writer, producer and director Woody Allen failed motion picture production at New York University (NYU) and City College of New York. He also flunked English at NYU.

Helen Keller, the famous blind author and speaker, said: "Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved. Silver is purified in fire and so are we. It is in the most trying times that our real character is shaped and revealed."

THE UNIVERSE KNOWS�

by Jerry Clark

I'm about to make a statement that I think may shock some of you� In other words, it will sound a bit esoteric and I know that I don't get too esoteric in these Rhino Tips often� However, I am simply compelled to write this statement because it just came to me this morning as I was doing my morning "Think Drive" - which I call my "Round"� I simply wake up in the morning and take a drive around my city and simply THINK� During this mornings' "Round", I had a lot on my mind� Certain questions I had recently posed to myself, and certain decisions I had to make about various issues� One of the decisions was a very challenging one and I had a lot of emotions wrapped up in it� I simply wasn't sure of what I should do even though the answer was quite clear� Have you ever been in that space? Deep down inside you know what to do but you can't quite get yourself to act on that Deep "Inner Knowing"� Well, this decision I had to make was what I call a "Destiny Decision"� In other words, I was conscious of the fact that my decision would drastically impact my entire destiny� But something was communicating to me at a "Deep" level telling me what would be the more empowering decision and I was still "Stuck"� Have you ever been there? Well guess what? By the time I got home, I had realized that the Universe had notice my hesitancy on acting on the somewhat obvious and so it -- The Universe -- decided to Act on Me� Ok, Ok� I know without the specifics, you're pulling your hair (if you got some) saying what is this guy talking about and what does it has to do with me� Ok, here it goes� The Universe arranged itself in a way to allow for no other decision but the one I was hesitating to make happen� Did you get that? In other words, events had happened by the time I got back home that gave me no other choice but to act on what I knew I was supposed to act on all along� With this said, let me now give you the statement that I was compelled to write:

THE UNIVERSE IS CONSCIOUS�

That's right; I believe that the Universe is Conscious� Conscious of your thoughts, your desires, your aspirations, your fears and frustrations, your hopes and wishes� I believe that the Universe is Conscious of you as an individual, and of the part you are to play in the grand scheme of things� I believe that the Universe is Conscious of your Destiny and the path that is truly yours by Divine Right� Oh, Oh, Oh� Jerry "DRhino" Clark didn't just go down the Divine path did he? My dear friends� I've always been down that path; I just don't expose it in words too often� But don't worry, I'm not going to change the name of these tips to "The Divine Rhino Tips" or "Rhino Tips From Beyond" or anything like that� I just know that there are decisions you are faced with right now and you are struggling with figuring out what to do� The point that I'm making is that you already know what to do and whatever that is, is what you are supposed to do� Now don't confuse a Deep "Inner Knowing" with an Emotional Conscious Desire� And don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about because I know that you do even though you may be trying not to� It's ok� Just remember that when you're faced with a decision and you think you don't know what to do, you really do know what to do, and even when you still think you don't know what to do, the Universe Knows what you should do so just act on what the Universe Knows instead of what you know and what you always knew would still manifest� (Whew� I know you're going to read that sentence over again.)

Anyway, that's it for now� I just had to express this message to you�

Remember� THE UNIVERSE IS CONSCIOUS AND THE UNIVERSE KNOWS�

Until next time�

Go, go, go!!

Zig Ziglar on Personal Discipline (& Habits)

Personal discipline, when it becomes a way of life in our personal, family, and career lives, will enable us to do some incredible things. One of my favorite sayings is "When you discipline yourself to do the things you need to do when you need to do them, the day will come when you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them."

We need to understand the difference between discipline and punishment. Punishment is what you do to someone; discipline is what you do for someone. My friend and mentor Fred Smith points out that some people are very disciplined in one phase of their life and not in another. Pavarotti, for example, was a perfectionist in his music and yet totally unregulated in his eating habits. Elvis Presley's life points out the discrepancy between his discipline in his personal life and his creative life. Many noticed that he would sit at the piano, working for hours on his phrasing, going over and over it until it was exactly right. He was totally disciplined about his singing. Even some geniuses such as Ernest Hemingway, who lived a very dissolute and destructive life, said, "Every morning at eight o'clock I bite the nail."

Fred Smith goes on to say there are people with superior talent who will not submit to discipline and so are not known or recognized for their abilities. He met a young man who in high school could run so fast that he would run through the curves on the track. Coaches saw that he had world class speed and expected him to be an Olympian. He refused discipline, wanting to take the easy way of simply using his natural speed. He even lost his college scholarship. Laziness was his enemy.

Discipline is building good habits into reflexes which become part of our life. It's absolutely true that unless you can instill discipline upon yourself, you will never be able to lead others. Example is still the best teacher. As Fred says, "Discipline is building good habits into reflexes which become part of our life," and to this I would add that when it becomes a habit you will be able to control your impulses in each area of life and succeed in a balanced way.