Six Approaches to Scaling Teamwork: Fundamental Considerations
Gordon (Gordy) Curphy, PhD
Managing Partner at Curphy Leadership Solutions
Groups and teams are fundamental structures for organizing work, and organizations can be comprised of a handful to tens of thousands of teams. Some of the more popular team building approaches, such as those developed by Hackman, Hawkins and Turner, Lencioni, Tannenbaum and Salas, Drexler-Sibbett, and Tuckman provide detailed guidance for designing and facilitating team engagements. Although these approaches can be quite helpful when working with teams, they take time, are expensive, and do not scale. Medium to large federal and state agencies, educational and health care institutions, and multi-national corporations cannot afford to do facilitated engagements with every team if they want to systematically scale teamwork. Alternative methodologies are needed, and this is the first of a series of LinkedIn posts that describe what companies are currently doing to scale teamwork.?
Research shows that many organizations believe teamwork is important, yet only 20 percent of teams are high performing. This means that organizations need to be intentional if they want to create large numbers of high performing teams, as it is not likely to happen on its own. What tools or techniques are currently available to help organizations scale teamwork? As seen below, organizations have a range of options for systemically fostering teamwork. Because organizations face different challenges and have different teamwork needs, they leverage different components when scaling teamwork. Some might adopt a common team model and then use leadership development programs to train all people leaders how to build teams. Others might start with a team model, assessments, and engagements with an organization’s top teams to foster buy-in to a larger organizational change effort to improve teamwork. Strengthening the links between teams and talent management is a common thread across all these components. Most organizations treat teams and talent management systems as completely independent processes, yet those organizations scaling effective teamwork factor teams and team building ability into their talent management systems.
?Components for Scaling Teamwork
The structure and staffing needed to scale teamwork also varies by organization. Some are utilizing parts of the structure and staffing model described in diagram below whereas others are leveraging the entire model. Which components and staffing model are being utilized becomes clearer when describing the approaches organizations are using to scale effective teamwork found in upcoming LinkedIn posts.
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Scaling Teamwork Structure
Curphy Leadership Solutions offers workshops that train internal and external consultants on how to help organizations scale teamwork. Highly interactive, practical, and useful, Rocket Model Certification Workshops provide participants with all the tools they need to market, price, sell, design, and deliver team engagements, leadership development and high-potential programs, on-boarding plans, leadership assessments, and eLearning modules that enable organizations to scale teamwork. Contact Gordy Curphy ([email protected] ) for details about the public workshop taking place in November-December.
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Gordon Curphy is an Industrial & Organizational psychologist specializing in C-suite succession planning, executive coaching, top team facilitation, scaling effective teamwork, and leadership development. He has developed several successful commercially published leadership and team assessments; coached 200 C-suite executives; worked with over 600 top teams; collected data on 3,800 teams, trained 20,000 leaders; and sold over 100,000 books, chapters, and articles on leadership and teams. You can find more about Gordon’s leadership books and consulting services at: www.curphyleadershipsolutions.com and www.rocketmodelforteams.com .
Helping others create new value for themselves
1 个月As always Gordy a well thought out, proven, clear approach. Great learning thank you!
Equipping leaders and businesses to navigate our increasingly complex world.
1 个月That's a very interesting article, Gordy, which highlights for me how fragmented and ineffective approaches to building teams (as opposed to a team) tends to be. The emerging environment is going to demand an awareness that "teamwork" is what organisations are, and that more effective teamwork within and between teams will be necessary to enable organisations to adapt at the pace the future will demand. I suspect many of us unconsciously tend to view a "team" as a characteristic of the hierarchy or the organisation chart, rather than in terms of who has to do what, with whom, to get the job done. Seeing the concept of "team" through the lens of an organisation that responds quickly and effectively to change, and that orients towards and anticipates emerging needs at the pace necessary for survival, changes that. People have to be able to *do* teamwork; to "fit in" and orient themselves quickly to each other and the emerging challenge or opportunity. Assemble and work and disassemble at pace. And to do that, "teamwork" is something we have to learn and be able to do as individual, rather than just thinking about "how THIS group needs to work "as a team" Teamwork at scale is like Health and Safety. We're all involved, always