Successful VS Unsuccessful Teams
What Make a Team Unsuccessful?
Reasons for unsuccessful teams can include poor time management, of lack of openness, people sticking to the “I am right” attitude, but these are the top reasons a team is unsuccessful:
We didn't take enough time to know each other better.
To avoid this problem: ? Spend time knowing each other.
? Understand the way you interact with others, it will be much easier to work together.
? Not about social “liking”, about ability to work together.
We didn't listen to each other.
Two key rules:
1) Be present, be there with the person.
2) Second, ask questions for a better understanding.
Do your best to understand the people, the situation, the environment. Care about people, rephrase, just to make sure that you fully understand. Then, only then, share you thoughts based on what you heard.
Expectations were not explicit enough.
? Make the implicit explicit. In other terms, ask about expectations.
? What would you expect from this project? Good grades, a job, a friend make the implicit explicit, share.
? Cultural differences. Some cultures are more explicit than others. Adapt yourself to the hosting culture, and ask permission to express what you have to express.
We were a group of individuals, and not a team.
? A group of individuals has individual ambitions. People stick to individual positions, such as I'm right.
? A team has a common vision. Common vision is what we share as a common perspective.
Poor time management.
? Fix deadlines, and make sure you stick to them. Prioritize and anticipate.
We didn't ask for help when we needed it.
? We considered asking for help as a weakness – its is a strength.
What Makes a Team Successful?
The following are elements of a successful team:
Trust.
? Confidence in yourself, in the team, what we can achieve together, in what we can deliver in people.
? This doesn't mean that there is no doubt. Doubt is short term, trust is long term.
? Do what you say, and say what you do.
Listening and Reformulating.
? Listen is a key, listen, listen, listen.
? Make people feel respected and even more than that, I feel alive. So listen, listen, listen.
Mutual Respect
? It means accepting the difference saying yes, but sometimes saying no, or maybe. Respecting yourself and respect your integrity.
Solidarity
? Understanding someone else's constraints and acting as a team to accommodate them.
领英推荐
Expressing needs when it's necessary.
? If you don't express your vital needs, most of the time it's very difficult to guess because we are not you, so make the implicit explicit.
? Share why we're doing things
Get out of your comfort zone.
? Getting out of your comfort zone means putting different glasses on to see other perspectives.
Openness.
? Be open, be agile, ready to change, ready to adapt, be generous, choose your battle, let go sometimes.
Humor.
? Make fool about yourself; self mockery always works. Do things seriously without taking things seriously. Go out for a walk, take some fresh air, laugh.
Be proud of what you're doing.
***
Taking a systematic approach to analyzing how well your team is set up to succeed—and identifying where improvements are needed—can make all the difference.
Key takeaway
A relatively small number of factors have an outsized impact on their success. Managers can achieve big returns if they understand what those factors are and focus on getting them right.
To create a climate that helps diverse, dispersed, digital, dynamic teams—what we like to call 4-D teams—attain high performance, focus on the following:
Compelling direction
? The foundation of every great team is a direction that energizes, orients, and engages its members.
? Teams cannot be inspired if they don’t know what they’re working toward and don’t have explicit goals.
? should be challenging (modest ones don’t motivate) but not tto difficult.
? reward team with extrinsic and intrinsic rewards.
Strong structure
? High-performing teams include members with a balance of skills.
? Every individual doesn’t have to possess superlative technical and social skills, but the team overall needs a healthy dose of both.
? Diversity in knowledge, views, and perspectives, as well as in age, gender, and race, can help teams be more creative and avoid groupthink.
Supportive context
? This includes:
- maintaining a reward system that reinforces good performance
- an information system that provides access to the data needed for the work
- and an educational system that offers training
- securing the material resources required to do the job.
Shared mindset
? Distance and diversity, as well as digital communication and changing membership, make them especially prone to the problems of “us versus them” thinking and incomplete information.
? The solution to both is developing a shared mindset among team members—something team leaders can do by fostering a common identity and common understanding.
? promote shared understanding through a practice called “structured unstructured time”—that is, time blocked off in the schedule to talk about matters not directly related to the task at hand.
Together the four enabling conditions form a recipe for building an effective team from scratch. Review and rate your team regularly on these four categories.?