Shapiro - HBR Guide to Leading Teams

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Mary Shapiro

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS

Boston, Massachusetts

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shapiro, Mary.

HBR guide to leading teams / Mary Shapiro.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-63369-041-7 (alk. paper)

1. Teams in the workplaceManagement. 2. Leadership. I. Title.

HD66.S4844 2015

659.4'022dc23

2015007184

ISBN: 9781633690417

eISBN: 9781633690424

How often have you sat in team meetings, grousing to yourself, What a colossal waste of time. Why does it take forever for us to make a simple decision? What are we even trying to achieve here?

Dysfunctional teams are maddeningand sadly, they seem to be endemic to organizational life. But as the team leader, you have the power to change things for the better. Its up to you to get people to work well together and produce results.

How do you avoid the pitfalls youve experienced so painfully in the past? This guide offers step-by-step advice, drawing on time-tested principles, practical exercises, guidelines for structured team conversations, and examples from a range of industries and organizational settings.

Youll get better at:

• Picking the right team members
• Cultivating their skills
• Setting clear, smart goals
• Rallying support both within and outside the team
• Fostering camaraderie and cooperation
• Addressing bad behavior before it gets out of hand
• Promoting healthy dissent
• Resolving conflict when it rears its head
• Holding members accountable to one another, not just to you
• Keeping them focused and motivated to the end
• Identifying best practices for your next team

Invest in the people side of teamwork.

Make it small and diverse.

Connect in a meaningful way and learn what people need to do their best work.

Define your tasks and outcomesand your processes for achieving them.

Decide who will do what on the team.

Specify how the team will operate as a unit.

Sort out how the team will enforce its goals, roles, and rules.

Summarize what youve agreed to in your team-building conversations.

Create an environment where everyone participates.

Build skillsand trustin giving and receiving feedback.

Motivate them to contribute more by acknowledging what theyve done.

Get problems out in the open right away so you can move past them.

Discuss whats working and what may need to change.

Cultivate mutually beneficial external relationships.

Keep everyone focused and working productively until the end.

Reflect on what worked and what didnt.

Whether youre taking over an existing team, launching a new one, or have been leading a group for a while, getting people to work together to produce excellent outcomes is not easy. Each team is different, and each poses a distinct set of challenges. Maybe youve just been assigned to chair a task force of people from different units to launch a companywide initiative. Perhaps you manage five people who have to work together daily as a part of ongoing operations. Or maybe youve been struggling at the helm of a team so mired in conflict that the members couldnt reach agreement on anything if their lives depended on it. No matter what type of team youre leading, you probably face tight deadlines and high expectations and feel the pressure to churn out project plans, assign tasks, and, above all, execute.

Its only natural. We create teams to accomplish work, after all, so we tend to focus mainly on tasks. But thats just one side of the equation; we also need to focus on the people who will be carrying out those tasks.

If your team members dont have good relationships with one another, your team wont do good work. People will squabble. They wont trust each other. Theyll feel underappreciated, grumbling that others arent carrying their share of the load. Theyll stop collaborating. Tempers will flareand productivity will grind to a halt.

It takes time and energy to prevent complications like these and to get team members working well together. You have to explain tasks clearly, coordinate efforts, motivate people, resolve conflicts, give feedback, and develop skills. In short, you have to manage the people with as much discipline as you manage the work.

Before investing all that effort, consider whether you even need a team to do the job at hand. Weve all been on teams assembled for the wrong reasonsto rubber-stamp an already-made decision, for example, or to spread out the risk and blame in case a project goes badly. To ensure that your team has a solid reason for being, conduct a straightforward cost/benefit analysis: Will it help you meet your goals and improve your outcomes? Or can you do the work just as well yourself, with greater efficiency and fewer headaches?

If you decide the investment is worthwhile, youll want to create a winning team, of coursenot one that crashes and burns or limps along indefinitely. This book will help you do just that. Effective team leadership unfolds in three stages: build-up, managing, and closing out.

Just like a house, a solid team needs a strong foundation. But instead of stones or cement, your materials will be early discussions about goals, roles, rules of conduct, and the metrics youll use to gauge progress. Once youve enlisted people with the required skills and perspectives, the group must explicitly agree on what its trying to achieve, how it will get there, and what success will look like. This is how team building really works. Its not about ropes courses or whitewater-rafting trips, its about reconciling individual temperaments and work styles to get the most out of each contributor and the team as a whole.