Team and Team Building

Team and Team BuildingbyHilmi Ozdemir and Aysegul OzdemirIn our time, organizations often become too complex for both their leaders to run and employees to work efficiently and effectively. Among those organizations, military organizations are somewhat different from others by their unique characteristics such as size in human capital and inventory, budget, stakeholders, structure, mission, product, process, performance criteria, work environment, etc. Hierarchy, standing operating procedures, seniority, and military discipline manage nearly everything in the military organizations. Herewith these organizations work in both peacetime and contingency to be able to produce security that satisfies their stakeholders, especially external ones, within a limited budget. It is obvious that military budget cuts take place in almost every country. Captain D. Michael Abrashoff also defines the same situation in his book (Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy – It’s your Ship (2002)) from United States Navy point of view. “Like most businesses, in the Navy there is no fat left on the bone. We no longer enjoy having extra people hanging around to take up slack. We have to get the mission accomplished with limited resources. The only way to do is with a ruthlessly efficient organization”. This means these organizations shall always produce high quality products with less money. That is why they always have to find a better way to manage their resources (money, manpower and personnel, equipment, time), organizations, and processes effectively and efficiently. In order to be effective an efficient, millions of different management techniques are used depending on the characteristics of the organizations and the current work environment. However, we see some commonalities in almost all these techniques. These are most commonly used terms such as group works, team, team building, team spirit, and likely terms among personnel and within documentations. We can say that these terms are almost inherited in the military organizations. There might be some good reasons for using these terms everywhere in the military, but the crucial question is what those terms really mean. Definition of Team The terminology is important: when we are undisciplined in our language, we become undisciplined in our thinking and actions (Katzenbach J.R.1997). Lack of common understanding on the terms and definitions is the biggest constraint when we work in a project, or do a research or study. Sometimes, it turns out to be more than just a constraint, but a showstopper. Therefore, it is very crucial to clarify the terms and definitions in advance. Generally, the solutions to the most of the challenging problems simply lay in well-defined terms and definitions. The Learning Lexicon defines the term of team like “The word "team" can be traced back to the Indo-European word deuk (to pull); it has always included a meaning of "pulling together." (The modern sense of team, "a group of people acting together," emerged in the sixteenth century.)”It will be useful to take a quick look at the origination of the team idea in modern meaning. Dyer’s book “Team research and team training: A state-of-the-art review” helps us understand the history of the teams. The emergence of the team idea can be traced back to the late 1920s and early 1930s with the now classic Hawthorne Studies. These involved a series of research activities designed to examine in-depth what happened to a group of workers under various conditions. After much analysis, the researchers agreed that the most significant factor was the building of a sense of group identity, a feeling of social support and cohesion that came with increased worker interaction. There is no universally accepted team definition. Everybody defines teams based on his perspective by emphasizing the aspects of the teams that are considered most important. However, we will use a single team definition, which we provide below, throughout the study in order to help readers understand more easily and be more consistent.“A team is a small number of people with complimentary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993)”This team definition phrases above and beyond an everyday definition. It gives more than just wording the term of team. It brings all significant aspects of the team building process out to the surface. Another important point is that the inevitable integration necessity among these aspects. We define this integration by using the metaphor “team like a gearbox”. We believe that verbs like combine, merge, align, and coordinate are not powerful enough to express the actual meaning of integration. That is why we choose to use term of gearbox in order to transmit our definition to the readers in a correct way. To be able to talk about a real team, we need to have all these aspects working together with harmonization. None of these aspects is more important than the others are. Each one of them is necessary from team building and team performance point of view. At first glance, team size looks like a negligible aspect among other aspects. We advocate just the opposite idea. The number of people in a team really matters to be successful in other aspects of the team. Sometimes the size issue can be the key for success and have significant impact on the overall results. There are three factors that are important to the structure of successful teams; first, successful teams contain smallest number of members necessary to accomplish goals and tasks (Wheelan, 2005). Evan Wittenberg, director of the Graduate Leadership Program in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, notes that team size is "not necessarily an issue people think about immediately, but it is important". "The size question has been asked since the dawn of social psychology," says Wharton management professor Jennifer S. Mueller, recalling the early work of Maximilian Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer born in 1861 who discovered that the more people who pulled on a rope, the less effort each individual contributed. Ringelmann's famous study on pulling a rope -- often called the Ringelmann effect -- analyzed people alone and in groups as they pulled on a rope. Ringelmann then measured the pull force. As he added more and more people to the rope, Ringelmann discovered that the total force generated by the group rose, but the average force exerted by each group member declined, thereby discrediting the theory that a group team effort results in increased effort. Ringelmann attributed this to what was then called "social loafing" -- a condition where a group or team tends to "hide" the lack of individual effort.Some researches say 5-7 while others say 5-9 or 9-12 number of people is the optimum for the best performance. In fact, there is no magic number. When we talk about sports teams, they have a specific number of team players. Nevertheless, when it comes to the business area, where teamwork is increasingly widespread throughout complex and expanding organizations, there is no fixed rule to determine the optimal number to have on each team. Each team may be in different size based on the type of task, performance, and skill requirements. Most experts recommend a range between two to seven, unless there is a pedagogical reason to make the team larger. When the team has more than nine members, subgroups will form within the team. On the other hand, if the number is too small, then there may not be enough "peer pressure" to enforce that all members complete their work. However, we can say that the teams with small number of people obviously perform better than the teams having many people in it. Katzenbach and Smith (1993) describe the disadvantages of large number of people teams as follows: “Large groups face logistical issues like finding enough physical space and time to meet together. They also confront more complex constraints, like crowd or herd behaviors that prevent the intense sharing of viewpoints needed to build a team. As a result, large groups tend to settle on less clear statements of purpose that, typically, get set by the hierarchical leaders, and they look to teamwork values as their working approach.” Lack of rigidity is basic to good teamwork, but my ability to work with others depends to a large extent on our compatibility and complementarity-that is, on the ability of our personalities or styles to enhance each other, supply each other’s missing traits, and support each other (Schutz, 1994). Too often people may think that “getting along” is the most important feature of a team. While it is true that team members must work together, being friends is not the key issue. In contrast, great teams accomplish their work largely because the teams bring together the right mix of different skills and understandings. Most of the world-altering inventions of the twentieth century emanated from groups of people with complementary skills-not just the inventor toiling as a lone genius (Leonard and Swap, 2005). When we say complementary skills, we talk about “building a relation between two opposite states or principles that together work for the same goal”. Complementary skills provide synergy when the team is diverse and various ideas and multiple skills are combined. If the team is composed of like individuals, we limit the number of solutions for creative problem solving. Synergy refers to the phenomenon in which two or more discrete influences or agents acting together create an effect greater than that predicted by knowing only the separate effects of the individual agents. Synergy usually arises when two persons with different complementary skills cooperate. In business, cooperation of people with organizational and technical skills happens very often. In general, the most common reason why people cooperate is that it brings a synergy.On a more psychological level, conflict is necessary for the establishment of a safe environment. While, at first glance, this may seem paradoxical, conflict is helpful to the development of trust. Thus, marriages become more solid and real after the first fight. It provides energy, a shared experience, and a sense of safety and authenticity, as well as allowing for deeper trust levels and collaboration.To be a successful entrepreneur, one needs to be mature, disciplined, and should always listen to others, Mr. Pramod Haque, managing partner, Norwest Venture Partners, said. Successful entrepreneurs know that they need to have complementary skills. If not, they would fail in their business. Successful entrepreneurs have the ability to have diverse skills. They also have great abilities to articulate and are passionate about their vision. Some of the businesses have in fact failed because the companies’ founders were all engineers and did not have management or marketing professionals, he said at the ICICI Venture-CII Connect 2006 Entrepreneur Awards. Katzenbach and Smith (1993) put team skill requirements into three categories. These are technical or functional expertise, problem-solving and decision-making skills, and interpersonal skills (risk taking, helpful criticism, objectivity, active listening, giving the benefit of the doubt, support, and recognizing the interests and achievements of others). It is significant to have these skills to some extent at the outset of the teambuilding. However, we need to give some credits to learning and improving these skills throughout teamwork where there is a potential.We need to focus on and appreciate the different perceptions that people bring to the team, rather than just applauding commonalities. Recognition of different skills adds more to the team’s strength. It is quite noteworthy to recognize each member’s contribution by using his or her skills to the team performance. Different skills are like pieces of a puzzle. The real issue over here is to build the puzzle by using the right piece at the right place and time. Katzenbach and Smith (1993) argue, “For a real team to form there must be a team purpose that is distinctive and specific to the small group and that requires its members to roll up their sleeves and work together to accomplish something beyond individual end-products”. Common purpose is the driving force of teams. We shall come together to discuss what our team stands for, which is the reason of our team’s existence. We also shall articulate a purpose that we can commit to, a purpose that makes all our teamwork meaningful, and a purpose that has ownership by all individuals. We shall not consider team purpose as “a sacred cow”, “a holly phrase”, or “a law carved in stone”. Teams need to revisit the purpose periodically to make it more relevant as the teams develop. Common purpose transforms a group into a team, and without understanding and commitment to that purpose, all attempts to improve teamwork will have limited value. If any one member fails to perform his role then it can hinder the achievement of that purpose. Even if the members fulfill their individual roles yet the team does not work synergistically, then they may not fulfill their potential or achieve as much as they could. If we want to improve teamwork, the most important foundation we need to lay is that of common understanding and commitment to the shared purpose. If you want to climb the ladder, you have to do more than your specific job; you have to do things that affect the lives of others in the organization (Abrashoff, 2002). One of the characteristics of high performance teams is that members agree with the team’s goals. That means they think the goals are important, reasonable, and attainable and will benefit the team as well as the organization (Wheelan, 2005). Specific performance goals are embedded into purpose. One does not mean anything without other. The team’s near term performance goals must always relate directly to its overall purpose (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993). Performance goals, what the team is meant to achieve, are the translation of the purpose into tangible aims. Andersen (2005) defines the performance goals by listing below generic characteristics from project management point of view:· Goals are concrete deliverables.· Goals need to be measurable so that progress towards achieving them can be monitored and results confirmed. Goals help us determine the performance of the project. If a goal sets out what the project is supposed to produce, the specifications, costs and timescale, it should not be difficult to say whether the project did what it was supposed to do.· A goal must always represent a commitment; otherwise it is pointless.· To express an activity as a goal is not a good approach. A goal should express the desired outcome.· Main goals can be divided into sub goals, and a sub goal can include several performance targets.· Goals need to be challenging, but not impossible to achieve.“John F. Kennedy said, “We will put a man on the moon.” That sentence explains almost everything you need to know about leadership and goals. It is clear. It is significant. And it engages (Robbins and Finley, 2000).” Teams need challenging and well-defined performance goals. Performance goals are the acting, moving, and energizing force of the team. Meaningful goals are the key factors that foster the hard work and necessary for success. When challenging goals are set, the team will mobilize its efforts to find innovative ways to achieve feats that may have been considered impossible. Providing a challenging goal is the most important motivator to sustain team effort. Goals provide a sense of direction to the team so that when conflict occurs it is possible to channel the conflict more constructively by returning to the goals for direction. The more people know what the goals are, the better buy-in and results we can get. Katzenbach and Smith (1993) summarize some good reasons to have specific goals as follows:· They define a teamwork product that is different from summation of individual job objectives.· They facilitate clear communication and constructive conflict within the team.· They help teams maintain their focus on results.· They have a leveling effect that is beneficial to team behavior.· They help individuals build commitment by allowing the team to achieve small wins.· They are challenging.Common approaches are the way team members agree on how they will work together in order to accomplish their purpose. Many teams develop their own charter or set of rules that outline the expected behaviors of team members. Having had a common approach, team members will have a shared understanding on how to perform their role and perceive the other team members’ roles. Each team needs to agree on a common approach to ensure that all team efforts are purposeful and that all team members contribute to the work. Common approach is like a rudder on a ship that helps us drive the ship to the defined destination point (purpose) by following the accurate courses (specific goals). Abrashoff (2002) argues communicating purpose and meaning on a ship: “the whole secret of leading a ship or managing a company is to articulate a common goal that inspires a diverse group of people to work hard together. That is why my sailors got: a purpose that transformed their lives and made the ship a composite of an elite school, a lively church, a winning football team, and- best of all- the hottest go-to ship in the Navy”. The last part of the definition focuses on holding team members accountable for their contributions to the team. This is no easy task. This aspect of the team includes commitment to the common performance, goals and approaches, and building mutual trust within the team. Mutual accountability grows naturally as the team performance increases. We believe that Abrashoff (2002)’s unity discussion in his book can give a good summary for what we have discussed under team definition title so far. He says, “If you surround yourself with people exactly like yourself, you run the dangerous risk of groupthink, and no one has the creativity to come up new ideas. The goal is not to create a group of clones, culturally engineered to mimic one another. Rather, unity is about maximizing uniqueness and channeling that toward the common goals of the group. Too often individuals champion their individuality as an excuse to do whatever they want, whenever they want. That is no formula for success in battle or in business. As Benjamin Franklin put it when he defied British and signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 “We must indeed all hang together, or, assuredly, we shall all hang separately””. Team versus GroupBring together your all-stars and create a new team. Will they produce stellar performance? Probably not. The best string quartet is not created by assembling the greatest violinists, cellist, and violist. In sports, the best teams are not the all-star gatherings. And in business, a collection of the best individuals from marketing, finance, production, and research doesn't guarantee the best multifunctional team.When John Amatt led the 1982 Canadian team on successful Mount Everest Expedition, only three people reached the summit. Many climbers who were part of the team, whose lifetime ambition was to stand on top of Everest, made the conscious choice to stay in the base camp. Why? Because they knew, the effort was likely to fail if everyone tried to make it. They chose to forego their individual dreams in favor of helping the team succeed. This was not John Amatt’s first time to plan an Everest expedition. Ten years earlier, with one of his friends from Norway, he had gathered a team of world-class climbers from many different countries, for the challenge. But, at the last minute, he backed out. Officially, it was to get married. But, “that was just an excuse,” he said later. “I knew that, despite having the best climbers in the world, this expedition would not succeed. Everyone wanted to reach the top for his or her own glory or that of his or her country. No one seemed willing to make decisions for the good of the team.” His fears proved founded. Not only did the team not cooperate to make it to the top, at one point, these sophisticated expert climbers even indulged in a rock-throwing fight. Groups and teams have always been with us and will not go away. We can hope that some of the faddish trends in relation to teams will go away. The importance of teams in the workplace, however, is here to stay. The bad news about the intense focus on work groups is that everyone is trying to develop methods to help groups become more effective and productive, not everyone knows what they are doing.A team is not just a bunch of people with excellent skills who work at the same time and in the same place. As emphasized within the team definition in previous section, a real team is a small group of very different individuals who share a commitment to working for common purpose, common goals and approaches and feel themselves mutual accountable. The key point here is not the equality and/or superiority of skills, talents, and experiences, but the commitment to the common purpose and performance goals.Stephen (2005) has discussed and summarized the basic differences between groups and teams. He used goal, synergy, accountability, and skill aspects of the teams and groups to make the comparison. A group is number of people that interact primarily to share information and to make decisions to help each group member perform within his or her area of responsibility. The main goal of the groups is to share information to the possible extent, and they do not have a common purpose and commit themselves to reaching common performance goals. Stephen (2005) uses almost the same justifications as Katzenbach and Smith (1993) do in their books while mentioning about different behaviors of groups and teams. These are discussed in rest of this paragraph. Groups make no serious effort to find a common path for moving ahead together. A working group relies primarily on the individual contributions, of its members for group performance, whereas a team strives for a magnified impact that is incremental to what its members could achieve in their individual roles. Unlike teams, a working group uses its purpose solely to delineate individual roles, tasks, and responsibilities. Groups pay attention to individual outcomes and results. In a group, members distrust the motives of colleagues because they do not understand the role of other members. Expressions of opinion or disagreement are considered divisive or non-supportive. Group members are usually reluctant to convert conflicts and differences into strength and challenging goals by discussing those conflicts and differences. It is not realistic to think we can live or work others without some conflict, but by communicating about the differences and focusing on the common goals, we can be a team. In a team, members work in a climate of trust and are encouraged to openly express ideas, opinions, disagreements, and feelings. Group members do not take responsibility for results other than their own (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993). In contrary to working groups, teams require both individual and mutual accountability. Since the lack of diverse or complementary skills within groups, we expect no synergy or negative synergy sometimes from these groups. It is possible to find various skills, even exceptional ones, in the groups, however groups cannot take the advantage of these skills by integrating them in order to create strength within the team. Group members usually use their skills, so to speak “stand alone” skills, to perform their individual tasks.Journey from Group to TeamGroups develop across time very much like people do. People experience childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, and old age. Childhood is associated with dependency. Adolescence usually contains some periods of conflict. Young adulthood requires that people spend a lot of time developing trusting relationships and preparing for work careers. In adulthood people spend a significant amount of time working, and in old age people typically reduce their focus on work. Research has found that groups also experience periods of dependency, conflict, trust and structuring, work and disengagement. Group development and human development have much in common.In this section, we will talk about a journey starting from group and ending at team from psychological, organizational, and technical perceptions. Carmazzi’s “Caveman Effect” approach well explains how the psychological reactions affect the team effectiveness. Katzenbach and Smith (1993)’s Team Performance Curve demonstrates how well any small group of people performs depends on the basic approach it takes and how effectively it implements that approach. Wheelan (2005) lists the stages of group development in a simple and understandable way by benchmarking human development cycle. The caveman's brains got bigger and more developed. Individuals became torn between finding there own path and gaining there own recognition, verses conforming to the group. Physical strength was no longer the dominant factor for influence. Now, people could think! Survival was no longer the acquisition of food and shelter; it had become a fight of ability. The more intelligent you were (and able to apply it), the more valuable you had become. The more influence you could exert over others, the more powerful you became. We began to compete for significance trying to show others how important and able we are, and if they believed us, or in some cases feared us, we became even more important. Groups evolved into teams but the fundamentals of our survival instinct, our emotional evolution and the emotions that drive us were still there, and a major part of our psychology. Our ability to work at our peak in teams depended on the way these emotional drivers and understanding the dynamics they promote. We now seek better ways to improve our selves and our performance, but our caveman nature sometimes gets in the way. While our modern brain is influenced by numerous factors of emotional drive, the three that came from our caveman days are still central to our performance in teams: The drive to belong, the drive for security, and the drive to be significant. The journey to the evolution of highly effective teams is scattered with the angry beatings and quiet disillusionment of cavemen everywhere. Effectiveness is against our nature. Only in the face of our inadequacies can we evolve, can we increase our ability to be intelligent in our actions, and can we assist others in there evolution. The advantages of this growth are a happier, less stressful, and more productive life. The consequences of not evolving are a life full of reaction, stress and unfulfillment . Katzenbach and Smith (1993) provide the following discussion for the team evolution in their team performance curve. Unlike teams, working groups rely on the sum of “individual bests” for their performance. Working group is a group of people for whom there is no significant incremental performance need or opportunity that would require it to become a team. People who call themselves teams but take no such risks are at best pseudo-teams. Pseudo-team is a group of people for whom there could be a significant, incremental performance need or opportunity, but it has not focused on collective performance and is not really trying to achieve it. These teams are the weakest of all groups in terms of performance impact. In Pseudo-teams, the sum of the whole is less than the potential of the individual parts. Potential teams take the risks to climb the curve. Potential team is a group of people for whom there is a significant, incremental performance need, and that really is trying to improve its performance impact. However, potential teams require more clarity about common purpose, goals, and approaches. There is no collective accountability in potential teams. Real teams are the teams that best fit in our team definition provided previously. High-performance team is a group that meets all the conditions of real teams, and has members who are also deeply committed to one another’s personal growth and success.The journey from group to real team is not always an easy and comfortable one. There are a lot of potential risks and possible disappointments on the “leap of faith” line to possible team. Like human beings, groups have some rocky times on the road to maturity (Wheelan, 2005). The slope from potential team to real team is quite steep and requires a considerable amount of effort. Wheelan (2005) breaks this whole journey into four stages that she thinks they really occur in groups in the real world like: Stage-1: Dependency and Inclusion; Stage-2: Counterdependency and Fight; Stage-3: Trust and Structure; Stage-4: Work and ProductivityWheelan (2005) also suggests that there are 10 key areas that team members should pay attention to in order to ensure the productivity of their team: goals; roles; interdependence; leadership; communication and feedback; discussion; decision making, and planning; implementation and evaluation; norms and individual differences; structure; and cooperation and conflict management.As a conclusion we shall:· Have the common understanding on the terms and definitions· Focus on team basics· Assess our current team effectiveness· Put effort to be a real team by improving our effectiveness in some key areas such as communication, leadership, planning, and conflict management.ReferencesAbrashoff, Michael D. It’s your ship (Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy). New York: Warner Business Books, 2002.Katzenbach, Jon R. and Smith Douglas K. The Wisdom of Teams (Creating the High-Performance Organization). Berkshire: McGraw-Hill, 1993.Locurcio, Ralph V. Fast Integrated Regional Systems Technology (FIRST): A regional Approach to Disaster Response and Recovery. Logistics Spectrum Journal, Volume 40, Issue 3Robbins, Harvey and Finley, Michael. Why Teams Don’t Work (What goes Wrong and How to Make it Right). San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2000Robbins, Stephen P. Organizational Behavior. New York: Prentice Hall, 2005.Shutz, Will. The Human Element (Productivity, Self-esteem and the bottom line). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994.Tamm, James W. and Luyet, Ronald J. Radical Collaboration. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004Thomas, Gail Fann, Suchan Jim, and Barrios-Choplin Bob. Readings in Managerial Communication. San Francisco: Simon&Schuster, 1997.Wheelan, Susan A. Creating Effective Teams (A Guide for Members and Leaders). London: Sage Publications, 2005.Baker, Wayne E. Teams as Networks: Using Network Analysis for Team Development. Retrieved in March 2007 from http://www.humax.net/teams.htmlCarmazzi, Arthur F. The Evolution of Inventing High Performance Teams. Retrieved in March 2007 from http://www.carmazzi.net/ Chennai. Complementary Skills Key to Entrepreneurs' success. Retrieved in March 2007 from http://www.blonnet.com/2006/09/11/stories/2006091101250200.htmClark, Donald. Matrix Teams. Retrieved in March 2007 from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leadtem2.htmlCrow, Kenneth. Building Effective Product Development Teams/Integrated Product Teams. Retrieved in March 2007 from http://www.npd-solutions.com/pdt.htmlHick, Mike. Team Effectiveness. Retrieved in March 2007 from http://www.eagle.ca/~mikehick/teams.htmlFripp, Patricia. A Team is more than a Group of People. Retrieved in March 2007 from http://www.humax.net/teams.html Knowledge@Wharton. Is your team too big? Too small? What is the right number? Retrieved March 2007 from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu Paster, Luisa R. Teambuilding Techniques. Retrieved in March 2007 from http://library.princeton.edu/hr/training/ExcellenceTeambuildingTechniquesHandout.doc Putnam, Doug. Team Size can be the Key to Successful Projects. Retrieved in March 2007 from http://www.qsm.com/process_01.html Team Technology Publisher. Team building – A complete guide. Retrieved in March 2007 from http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/tt/h-articl/tb-basic.htmWikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. Synergy. Retrieved in March 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergy