Leadership and Decision

Making

Team leadership

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According to Jon Katzenbach (one of the
main authorities on teams:
 A team is a small number of people, with
complementary skills, who are equally
committed to a common purpose, goals and
working approach, for which they hold
themselves mutually accountable.
 High performing teams are all of those things,
plus having members who are also deeply
committed to one another‟s personal growth
and success. (HP teams are discussed in
detail in later slides).

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Team Effectiveness 101
(basics about the subject)

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Need for Team Leadership/ team leaders.

 They play an important personal role in

influencing team performance/ building
effective teams.
 Encourage norms that have positive effects
and alter norms that have negative effects.
 Without effective leadership, teams can get
off course, go too far or not far enough, lose
sight of their mission and become blocked by
interpersonal conflict.

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From ‘leader’ to a ‘team leader’…

 Must learn to lead in new ways.

 Requires a shift in mindset and behaviour (for those
who are accustomed to working in traditional
organisations in which managers make all the
decisions).
 Must be knowledgeable in the team process and
capable of developing a productive and effective
team.
 Team members will look to the leader to put
together a game plan and lead the team to success.
 Role model the behaviour desired from the team
members

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Team leadership goal

 Effective team leaders foster the development of

team spirit by:
- Observing what‟s going on in the team
- Making contributions when necessary
- Encouraging communication
- Turning problems into opportunities
- Constructing an environment of collaborative
learning, viewing themselves and others as part of
the team‟s pool of knowledge, skills and ideas.

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Team leadership roles

 Manager
 Facilitator
 Coach
(An effective leader must be adaptive
knowing when to play different roles)

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How can a leader ‘influence’ team
performance?
 Develop social skills (capacity to understand people
and social systems. They enable a leader to relate
well with team members).
 Display of self confidence
 Self sacrificing behaviour (going above and beyond
what is expected, get involved in making things
happen).
The results of a laboratory experiment revealed that
productivity levels, effectiveness ratings and
perceived leader group orientedness and charisma
were positively affected by leader self sacrifice.
(Lussier, 2007)

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A summary of the key responsibilities a leader should
undertake in order to create an effective team (Lussier,
2007)

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Evolution of teams and team leadership
Types of teams
1. Consists of a group of
employees belonging to the
Leader dominated 1. Functional teams same functional department
(marketing, production, HR),
who have a common objective

2. Consists of a group of
employees belonging to
2. Cross functional different functional departments,
brought together to perform
teams unique tasks to create new and
innovative products and
services.
3. Consists of a group of
employees whose members
3. Self managed share or rotate leadership

Team dominated teams responsibilities and hold

themselves mutually
responsible for a set of
performance goals assigned by
higher management. They are
usually cross functional in
membership make up

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Creating High Performing teams

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How do I build my team?

 One of the biggest challenges

 Do you know how do to do this?
 If you know how, do you practice what you
know?

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Why is creating a High Performing (HP)
team so important?
 Most people in organisations have never
worked in a real team, let alone HP teams
 Many managers in organisations have never
created a real teams, let alone HP teams
 Most people and most managers operate
together in working groups, pseudo teams or
messed potential teams

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What EXACTLY is the difference
between groups and teams?
 All teams are groups but ALL GROUPS ARE NOT TEAMS.
 Groups are simply a collection of people working together
whereas the team concept implies a sense of shared mission
and collective responsibility.
 Team members tend to have shared responsibilities whereas
group members work slightly more independently with greater
motivation to achieve personal goals.
 Leadership style in a group tends to be very hierarchical while in
a team it is more likely to be participative or empowerment
oriented.
 Groups are characterised by individual self interest (“whats in it
for me?” mentality) whereas in a team incentives are team
based.
 Teams strive for equality between members, in the best teams
there are no stars and everyone suppresses individual ego for
the goof of the whole.

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In simple terms…

If…
Working groups achieve a 1
Pseudo teams may achieve a 1.5
Potential teams may achieve a 2
A real team will achieve a 5 or 10
A HP team will achieve a 20 or more
This is the magnitude in difference we are
talking about here!

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 If you know how to create a real team, and
even better create a High Performing (HP)
team, it is inevitable that your own
professional career will sky rocket. You will
be able to get a job practically anywhere or
even start your own successful business.

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Now lets look at the HOW: Steps to
create a HP team.
 Step 1: Create a very meaningful and simple
statement of the team‟s purpose and mission. It‟s
the one liner that answers the why you exist.
 E.g. to deliver outstanding service to all of our
customers.
 WHY: It brings meaning and purpose to our working
life that will likely be an explicit and public purpose
or mission for the team, and an implicit and private
purpose for each individual.

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Steps to create a HP team…

 Step 2: identify the very challenging single

performance goal for the team e.g. a total
valuation figure, a total profit figure or some
other performance metric goal.
 You must have a compelling and challenging
goal to aspire to. If you don‟t have this, don‟t
bother trying to create a team.

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Steps to create a HP team…

 Step 3: Create a compelling, exciting and

meaningful vision of what the team will achieve in
say, 2 years time. Ensure that it fully contributes to
that vision, mission and strategy of the overall
organisation.

 Step 4: Know where you are now. Get all the data,
every detail you need to know exactly where you
stand right now. Ensure that everyone faces the
brutal truth of where you are now.

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Steps to create a HP team…

 Step 5: Create a strategy and a detailed

action plan of how you will achieve your
vision and performance goal.
 Obviously consult with your team on this
strategy. It doesn‟t have to be a democratic
process but you must have a majority of
people brought into the plan. Explain and
display the plan in a very visible position.

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Steps to create a HP team…

 Step 6: Know who you have with you very very well
and make sure its not too many people. Keep your
core team number to a maximum of 10-12 people if
possible.
 Make sure you have the knowledge and skills that
you need to implement the strategy. Where there
are any gaps, fill them quickly.
 If you need to replace people, do this quickly and
professionally.
 WHO should you have in the team: Have a mix of
technical and functional expertise and problem
solving and decision making skills and great
interpersonal skills.

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Steps to create a HP team…

 Step 7: Create a team charter or working approach. A set of

guidelines about how you will work together. Do not overlook
this deceptively ordinary and basic task.
 Remember, everything always starts well with good intentions
but real teams face real challenges and interpersonal
problems. And that‟s when you need a set of working
guidelines to fall back on. It is important to solve these
obstacles and challenges

 Step 8:As the leader, role model the actions and behaviour
that are required for the team to succeed. Being a leader does
not mean you don‟t do real work. You cannot just supervise.
You must do and be seen to do real work as well.

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Steps to create a HP team…

 Step 9: Coach every member of your team every

week for at least 30 minutes if not more. This is in
addition to the ad hoc coaching that should be going
on all the time anyways. And get a coach yourself.
Someone outside the team who can challenge you.

 Step 10: Measure closely the KPIs of the team and

display them very visibly in the team working area.

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Steps to create a HP team…
 Step 11: Have monthly group feedback sessions where each
person gives direct and balanced feedback to everyone else in
the team. This is not about blaming, judging, problem solving or
defending. Just get into a process in which each person receives
feedback from everyone else in the group, just says thank you for
it. And then you move onto the next person. Do not avoid giving
direct feedback

 Step 12: Celebrate success, both individually, in private and also

publicly in a team. Go out and do fun things .Sometimes dinner
out together will be the best, sometimes going out for a whole
day and doing something adventurous.

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Steps to create a HP team…

 These were the very basics of how to create

a high performing team. They are not
everything but they are the main elements.
 You will only be as successful as your team
is and a HP team will deliver 20 times more
value than just a working group. When you
can create a HP team, you will be able to
move into any managerial position. The
results will just speak for themselves!

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Team effectiveness

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How can we identify ‘ineffective’ teams?

 The don‟t do the job/ task they are meant to

do.
 Team members do not want to attend the
team meetings because the team meetings
don‟t accomplish the work.
 The team meetings are not productive

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 So…THE FIRST TEAM MEETING IS VERY
IMPORTANT!

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What questions should the First team
meeting address?
 Why are we here?
 What are we trying to accomplish?
 What are the goals and values that we will uphold? E.g. how
committed we are to the team, how important is this team compared
to all the other things we have going on in our lives
 What are the agreements about meeting attendance, about
performance of the team, about communication in the team (such
procedural issues must be dealt upfront otherwise people will have
different expectations
 People will end up being „bad‟ team members if the team has not
developed a common sense of what or who it is.

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An example of a meeting plan

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Team effectiveness

 Teams are very vulnerable (in a good way) to being

re-organised.
 When team members get a sense, „we are about to
fall apart because there is not enough time to do the
project and we are not performing and producing at
a level that will get us to the end‟, that is the point
when the team will re-organise itself.
 It will take advantage of the vulnerability to do the
task in a different way (this is what happens in well
performing teams).

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Being the leader of a team.

What a good leader does is allow the team

members to
 Come together

 Express their opinions

 Get the differences out

And then
 Motivate and facilitate getting the things back
together in a new whole by taking into account and
consideration the information that has been put „out
there‟.
Team leadership is NOT necessarily having your way!
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Dealing with conflict

 The behaviors exhibited in a team are not

necessarily a function of the individual.
 They are a function of the individual interacting with
others.
 You may say “He is the jerk and the team would
work very well if he would leave”. But the truth is if
he left, another one of the members would start to
be termed as the „jerk‟.
 Its not him. It‟s the interaction. Removing him does
not make it better

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How do we fix the situation?

 What it takes is emotional maturity and the

ability to engage in uncomfortable situations
and push through.

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What blows up teams?

 One of the best predictors of teams that blow

up GOAL CONFLICT!
 Difference in goals within a team will kill a
group faster than anything!
 A team can survive a lot of different types of
conflict but it cant survive GOAL CONFLICT!

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Interpersonal conflict vs task conflict

 Task Conflict: Telling the leader, “I don‟t think is the

right way to accomplish the task, we need to think
different ways of accomplishing this task.”
This is exactly what teams are for. Such thinking
needs to be encouraged BUT what you should be
focusing on as a leader is, we want the divergence
of opinions to come out and then there has to be
some convergence. If you don‟t get the
convergence, that good kind of conflict evolves into
interpersonal conflict.
 Interpersonal Conflict: Telling the leader “I don‟t like
your style, I don‟t like who you are.” (very damaging)

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Too much bad conflict…then what?

 Swift trust: the belief that people have good

intentions (often happens with virtual teams).
 If you have to much interpersonal conflict then it
means you have agreed (implicitly if not explicitly)
that nobody has good intentions. We are all here for
ourselves, not here for the team
 Have a discussion with the team members about
what their motivation is
 What happens is that what really is task conflict has
been misinterpreted as interpersonal conflict and
then acted upon as if it were interpersonal conflict.

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In summary, guidelines for effective
teamwork
1. The first meeting is very important. The purpose
should be to establish common goals and
expectations.
2. Utilize the mid point re-organisation. Assess
completion and redistribute tasks
3. Good leadership allows divergence. However
convergence is required for progress
4. Task conflict is part of good team work. However
interpersonal conflict is counterproductive

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And if the team is beyond repair

 Use “SWIFT TRUST”!

Assumption
 All team members have good intentions!
What has been misinterpreted as
interpersonal conflict is in fact, task conflict.

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Team Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

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 EI Competencies
(Goleman, 2001)

Self-Awareness Social-Awareness
 Emotional awareness  Empathy
 Accurate self-assessment  Service Orientation
 Self-confidence  Organizational awareness

Self-Management Social skills

 Leadership
 Adaptability
 Develop others
 Self-control
 Change catalyst
 Conscientiousness
 Conflict management
 Initiative
 Influence
 Achievement Orientation
 Building bonds
 Trustworthiness
 Communication
 Teamwork (creating a shared
vision and synergy in teamwork).

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Social Skills Cluster of EI

Social skills / Relationship Management Cluster:

 Leadership: inspiring and guiding groups and people
 Developing Others: helping others improve performance
 Change Catalyst: initiating or managing change
 Conflict Management: resolving disagreements
 Influence: getting others to agree with you
 Building bonds: building relationships
 Communication: sending clear and convincing messages
 Teamwork: creating a shared vision and synergy in team
work

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