Team Power

As a part of our Organizational Behavior course, i was going through a video on "Teams & Organizational change"; a Harvard Business School Management productions based on J. R. Katzenbach, Douglas K. Smith 's philosophy on teams- creation, maintenance and performance.

Background : J. R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith are very well known in the O.B area and their views are almost kotlerish when it comes to this field of management.

According to their views, for any team to be successful it has to follow certain ideal scenarios :-

1. The team has a common purpose
2. The Team has a specific set of goals
3. The team is small enough, to work as a team
4. The team has a commonly agreed upon working approach
5. The team has all the skills in place to meet the goals.
6. The teams are holding themselves mutually accountable for the outcome or results.

Going through this hit-list i found that almost all except points 3 & 6 sounded steeped in common sense; and didn't have any sort of deepening impact on the left side of my brain.

Points 3 & 6 made me felt like hansel and grethel at last finding the bread-crumbs. These exact thoughts though now make perfect sense to me, would not have given the same level of nirvana if someone told me earlier that to have an effective team you needed to be both small and blame each other ;) .

This is the malady of all Indian IT companies. Just cause teams are the flavor of the season many of the Indian based IT companies, have been lapping it up without any proper implementation.

Point 3 : The team is small enough, to work as a team

Haven't we all seen or experienced organizations having a huge number of teams, each having their tasks pre-defined, and usually involved in some burecratic non-sense.
This actually reduces the flexibility of being in a Team. The whole purpose to organize members across teams is to give everyone cross-functional capabilities; rather than creating teams around problems we tend to create problems around teams.
Further most of these teams are quite large to manage, resulting in fragmentation and dialysis of the team goals.
Personally, I have always found creativity, empowerment & authority being developed faster across members in a smaller group than across mammoth pay-loads of team members, smaller teams ensure that decisions are being made faster, min. ego-clashes and large area of influence across each of the other members in the same team.

6th point : The teams are holding themselves mutually accountable for the outcome or results

This is the vital ingredient (Formula X) in the formulation of Teams.
Sometimes we often find that people within a team become so closely bonded that they place the individuals over the team priorities; this can easily be observed across archaic teams (classic Ex:Government of India).
The maxim "The Team is served by the weakest link" should be exemplified across all the team members, urging them to strive forward, challenge and commend each other.(Ex: Private sector)
We must ensure that we do not mis-read the point though. Holding each other mutual does not imply in finding the negative of each other... this shall only lead to utter chaos. The 6th point rather amplifies on the point that we must not safe-guard any people within the team and motivate everyone to contribute to the outcome.

Whatever i mentioned, is after all the summit of the moutain, cause the understanding and implementation of these maxims are those which would signify scaling of mountains.