Menu Close

Collaborative Intelligence

Play

here is the rub: research has shown that leader behavior makes the most constructive difference for teams that are reasonably well structured and supported in the first place. If a team is poorly composed, has an ambiguous or unimportant purpose, and operates in an organization that discourages rather than supports teamwork, there is no way that a leader’s hands-on interventions with that team can turn things around.

The six enabling conditions are: creating a real team , specifying a compelling direction or purpose for the team, putting the right number of the right people on the team, specifying clear norms of conduct for team behavior, providing a supportive organizational context, and making competent team-focused coaching available to the team.

If what holds members tightly together is a shared wish to maintain harmony and good interpersonal relationships, the risks of dysfunction are high. But if cohesiveness stems from a shared commitment to accomplishing the team’s task, it can unleash members’ energies and talents to generate synergies that never would be seen in a loosely bounded group.

One way to lessen the likelihood of purpose-related problems in managerial and professional teams is to establish, as a team’s first and most important task, the development of an agreed-upon statement of the team’s main purposes.

Someone who is internally motivated feels great when he or she has done well, and feels bad when things have gone poorly. It is those internally generated feelings that fuel motivation, not extrinsic rewards or prods from a supervisor.

…leaders often put too many people on the team in the first place, either to make sure the team has enough members to accomplish the work or to include at least one representative of every constituency with a stake in the outcome. The perverse result can be such an excess of members than the team has little chance to perform at a level that will please those same constituencies.

Psychological safety is a shared belief that the team is a place where one can take personal and interpersonal risks. Members of psychologically safe teams are better able to admit mistakes, more likely to ask for help from teammates, more open about what they do and do not know, and more likely to learn from the expertise of others.

The degree to which teams actually use the tools available to them, however, depends considerably on how those tools are made available. There is a world of difference between “We’ve put some great new software on your desktops that you and your teammates can use to coordinate your activities–give it a try, you’ll really like it” and “Can we talk to your team about how you work together, see what’s getting in your way or slowing you down? Maybe there are some tools out there that you’d find helpful.”

…the greatest leverage is obtained when coaching interventions address the three task performance processes…: the level and coordination of member effort, the appropriateness to the task and situation of the performance strategies the team is using, and the degree to which the team is using the full complement of its members’ knowledge and skill.