While it is important to support teams with winning technology tools for electronic collaboration, it is equally important to establish firm foundations for winning team behavior in the "human technology" realm. Below are three points to address in sponsoring any team to help ensure their successful performance.
First, establish clear and fully understood performance goals. If the members of a team are not perfectly clear on where they are going and how they will know when they get there (or when they are on track...), then performance becomes more a matter of good fortune than of good management.
Second, insure that a team is the right organizational form for achieving the performance goal. In addition to many benefits that teams can bring to leveraging opportunities and resolving issues, they also bring costs of ownership in the overhead to establish and sustain them. For many challenges and problems, teams are not necessary or even desired. (A correlate of this second trick is to insure that if you need a team, that you have created the right team. That is, do you have the right mix of skills and knowledge to address the task at hand?)
Third, having established the performance objectives and assessed that a team is the appropriate form to achieve those objectives, support the team in establishing its rules and methods for working. This often overlooked phase of launching a team is usually taken for granted as happening automatically, or as being so intuitive as to not require explicit action. But imagine for a moment that you are creating a soccer team - What would happen if your players did not understand the needs and rules governing their positions of play? Or did not have shared understanding about when to pass the ball or set up plays? Or did not understand the rules of the game?
In summary, the right technology tools are certainly necessary to enable high performance team work. But they are not in themselves totally sufficient. The "soft" side, or people technology issues of establishing teams, also need to be effectively addressed as part of creating a winning team.
About this Author
Kantor Consulting Group provides management consulting and leadership development coaching to help people, teams and enterprises realize bottom line results from the integration of information technology and human systems. For more information, please contact Bob Kantor at 845-418-2839 or bob.kantor@kantorconsultinggroup.com
Kantor Consulting Group, Inc.
- Strategic IT Cost and Performance Optimization
- Executive Coaching by Successful Leaders
http://www.kantorconsultinggroup.com
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