Leading High-Performing Team
High-performing teams are different from other kinds of team in that the sum of members’ individual knowledge, skills and competencies come to bear significantly on the final output of the group. Unlike in other teams where the team’s performance does not exceed the leader’s personal capabilities, either because the leader does not sufficiently empower the team or does not know how to do so. High-performance teams are able to exceed the limitations of its leader by drawing on the resources of team members to produce results that far exceed the leader’s abilities.
They are able to do this because each person within the team is a leader in their own right and other members of the group recognize and encourage this.
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The leader is able to foster a spirit of leadership that infuses the whole team and makes it self-starting, self-regulating and self- organizing. Members own the team vision and display a high degree of personal commitment. Additionally, they assume responsibility for monitoring and regulating one another, rather than leaving it all to the team leader.
The big question is ‘How can leaders build an inclusive team culture where one is a leader?’ The real question should be ‘Why are leaders unable to build more inclusive teams?’ It is important to understand some of the obstacles that prevent teams from progressing towards high performance.
- Team Leaders As Cultural Engineers: Most team leaders view their role in the team as limited to their professional competence, their position and the objectives of the team. They fail to see that their primary responsibility is that of crafting the team identity and character; building a framework to guide the interpersonal dynamics of the group. As result the team falls to the default culture of the leader or its most dominant members. And even when team leaders realize the need to build a culture, they do not know how
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Building a team where members feel like leaders and take the initiative requires the leadership to surrender some of its powers to the members. If leaders are more concerned about monopolizing power, they will do so at the expense of greater team creativity and collaboration.
To facilitate team performance, the leader must often recede to the role of facilitator rather than dictator. They must become willing to lead through persuasion versus instruction.
However, there are dangers to be aware of in this process. If teams become too decentralized in terms of leadership, it can lead to anarchy and unproductiveness. Therefore, the following three aspects most be well defined before a team can move productively into bottom up leadership without negatively affecting its effectiveness.
- Authority: The role and position of the leader must be well defined as the anchor that keeps the group on course toward its destination. The leader has information and perspective that is not available to team members, therefore responsibility for the team’s goal belongs to the
...team dynamics “depends largely on how willing team leaders are to share authority, responsibility, information, and resources”(p.119). Hence, it is important that managers are actively involved in the development of teams, address conflicts immediately, and allow team members to participate in the planning, decision making, and problem solving in regards to team goals.
The team jointly identifies plans, procedures, goals, vision, and develops strategies to achieve the leader’s objectives. The leader, leads by acting as a sort of facilitator: a guiding hand. Of course the leader does task delegation and team formation. But in general, a participatory leader involves as many stakeholders as possible when making decisions. This is important because most organizations make decisions with little input from the regular employees: decisions are top down and hierarchical (Hogan & Hogan, 1994). In developing my personal style of leadership, I prefer a more down-up or grass-roots grown decision making. I think the people at the bottom of any organization and the ones at the front counter understand what needs to be done or solved in any organization. Making organizational culture change must include the regular subordinate staff to realize the future vision of the organization. Participatory leadership aspires to involve a wide participation in decision making (Yukl,
According to Northouse (2012), team leadership has become one of the most popular theories of leadership research. A team refers to a group of employees within an organization, who are interdependent of each, and share a common goal which can only be realized through coordination of their activities. Actually, this can be attributed to the fact that team members typically have dissimilar and unique roles that represent critical contributions to collective action. It goes without mentioning that a team can either be virtual or non-virtual (Tiffan, 2014).
It is important to distinguish the difference between teams and groups. The main difference is that teams work altogether toward a common goal whereas groups can work altogether but for their own objective. It is important to highlight that a group does not necessary need a leader to follow but a team does and this leader will set directions to achieve the goal. In teams people are more committed as they share their ideas, they know the purpose of what they are doing and what the others are doing, they understand better individual objectives and team objectives whereas in groups, generally people are just told what they have to do without further explanations. Because in a team people get to know each other, it builds trust and enhances communication but in groups, people do not really know each other, do not trust or communicate effectively with each other. In teams it is frequent to see constructive conflict as people talk more openly and more honestly but in group it is quite rare. Eventually, people in teams are more involv...
According to our text, Communicating at Work, an effective team has eight characteristics. These characteristics are: clear and inspiring shared goals; a results driven structure; competent team members; unified commitment; collaborative climate; standards of excellence; external support and recognition; and principled leadership. A group goes through four stages in becoming an effective team; forming, storming, norming, and performing (Adler and Elmhorst, 240, 251). Most of the characteristics of an effective team are brought to the team by one or more members, others are formed during the development process.
Groups are defined as two or more people who work regularly with one another to achieve common goals (Schermerhorn, Hunt, & Osborn, 2005, Chapter 9). For a group to become a high-performance team, the team needs to be able to use their collective skills and behaviors to become an efficient model working towards a common goal. Having a common goal will make each team member accountable for the success and failure of the team. Since each team member is accountable to the team, each member's behavior will have an effect on the team. Cultural diversity and demographic characteristics affect an individual's behavior. Behavior caused by diversity and demographic characteristics will be a determining factor whether or not a group can be a high-performance team.
Leaders are the individuals who help to create options and opportunities. They help in identifying the choices and solve the problems. They build commitment and coalitions. Leaders do this by inspiring others and working along with them to construct the shared vision of the possibilities and commitments of a better group, organization or community. They engage the followers in such a way that most of the followers become leaders in their own right. The variety of demands of an increasingly complex world very often require that leadership be shared by most of the members of an organization, in appropriate ways for different situations. A leader is the on...
- In my own experiences, I have been both a leader and a manager in my professional life and find that leading can be difficult. Inspiring others to get on the same page and work together toward the same goal has its own challenges. It is much easier to manage the actual tasks associated with the project or the goal than it is to get buy in from others to complete those tasks.
The area of team leadership attracts a lot of attention in the modern world because of the need to assemble and deploy diverse teams for the completion of projects. The future of many corporations relies more and more on the kind of team leadership they have for their projects. This paper explores a number of facets that constitute effective team leadership.
High Performance Teams We will explore what it takes for a working group to become a high-performing team. We will see how these teams are formed and how a high performance team could benefit a company, and we will see how demographics and cultural diversity affect them. High performance teams are teams that get together for a specific, important task. It is important for everyone that is apart of the high performance team to have the same purpose and goals. If the teammates have different goals or motives, then it can make it difficult for the team to be effective.
Teamwork is becoming more important in the work place, because of the leaders and the fact that it allows full participation with all employees. In order to complete several different tasks, managers and supervisors usually perform teams and assign different tasks to complete one major assignment. Team work starts at the top (Smikle, 2009). When supervisors or managers are willing to administer teamwork, they are enabling the employees to follow. Managers or supervisors set good examples when they delegate tasks, but more importantly express to the employees how teamwork is productive. Employees work by example, more so now than by demands.
Realizing that a group can become a high performance team is important. Accomplishing this goal is invaluable, advantageous and profitable. Once able to operate from a group to the high performing team is a great step into preparation into the big business world. Leaders and members must also realize not only how to accomplish this but that some problems will and can arise from different demographic characteristics and cultural diversity. That is if one is in such a group, which the probability would be quite high.
Planning to have successful, high performing teams, is very important in the business world of today. The ability to be highly skilled at teamwork is one of the determining factors of future success or failure of many organizations. Being able to succeed at developing these high performing teams takes team building, teamwork, trust, and a plan for success. A high performing team is a group of “goal-focused individuals with specialized expertise and complementary skills who collaborate, innovate and produce consistently superior results. The group relentlessly pursues performance excellence though shared goals, shared leadership, collaboration, open communication, clear role expectations and group operating rules, early conflict resolution, and a strong sense of accountability and trust among its members” (Developing and Sustaining High-Performance Work Teams. 2015).
The way people respond in stressful situations says a lot about their character. A person’s reaction can tell you a lot about how they handle all types of situations, not just conflict. A person may respond a certain way due to how they were raised, the environment they live in, or because it makes the most psychological sense to the individual. You may say that a person’s reactions are based on what they learned growing up, after all, Joan E. Grusec and Tanya Danyliuck say people, “... are behaving in accord with information about appropriate parenting acquired through books, Web sites, or informal and formal advice.” And also say, “Yet another major determinant of their behaviour lies in their general attitudes as well as specific beliefs,
Leadership is the ability to influence individuals to make them want to achieve the objectives of the group the importance of leadership. It is the link between the workers and the organization's future plans and perceptions. It is working to unify the efforts of workers towards achieving the goals set. Control over the work and draw the necessary plans to solve problems. The development of individuals and their training, care and motivate them. The ability to increase individual development and humanitarian and practical