A521.6.3.RB - High Performance Teams

A521.6.3.RB - High Performance Teams

Based on this week's readings from the Denning text, identify the elements of high-performance teams and apply them to teams with whom you have worked in your organization. Next, identify the importance of shared values and discuss the influence of shared values on your team's performance. Finally, examine the four patterns of working together and detail one positive and one negative experience. What could you have done to influence the outcomes?

In my experience, high performance teams have a special synergy. The team members just seem to work well together and are able to collaborate without ego or personal agendas. They work together to produce something that is beneficial to everyone in the organization and because of these things, mostly resemble a community. Shared experiences bring the people together in a way that is powerful and creates an atmosphere of possibility.

The four patterns of working together are: work groups, teams, communities, and networks. (Denning, 2011) Work groups are generally those groups who are working on the same project in the same space. This is the most common kind of group in any organization. Work groups generally report to a common supervisor. When the organization I was working for decided to come up with a “Transformation Team” – this was a work group that consisted of people from different departments who for a year all worked together on the same project and reported to a common supervisor.

Teams are “organizational groupings of people who are interdependent, share common goals, coordinate their activities to accomplish these goals, and share responsibility for the performance of the collectivity.” (Denning, 2011) In my organization, when we are behind schedule or have an urgent project that needs immediate attention, we usually have a “Tiger Team” of people who come from the impacted areas and work together to solve the problem and prevent it from happening again. They are dedicated to these teams until the solutions are found, tested, implemented, and sustainable.

Communities are a recent addition to the work patterns and refers to a group of people basically share a common interest. “[C]ommunity meant a group of people in a specific geographical area who lived, worked, played, worshipped, and died together, sometimes over many generations.” (Denning, 2011) In my organization, we have an inSite internal website that brings communities together within Boeing. I belong to a few of these communities such as the Lean group, the Women in Leadership group, and even the Group of Awesome. We share articles, ideas, and even debates about things that we care a great deal about. We are not in the same geographical location, usually, but we all come together for a common interest.

Networks are more dynamic because they are always being built on, maintained over time and careers, and keep people connected in a mutually beneficial way. LinkedIn is a networking site that can help connect people to find new careers, mentors, and just connect with people in the same industry. It’s a place for recruiters to search for candidates and for former co-workers to keep in touch. Networking helps a lot in my organization because of its size. People come and go in a very cyclical manner and it is always good to know people in other business units who may be able to help solve issues for you and vice versa.

I was part of a workshop, a Lean team, last year that yielded both a positive and a negative experience. The positive experience was that I got to work with people I had never really met before. It built up my network of people and exposed me to some interesting aspects of the business of which I was previously only mildly aware. I learned so much over the week and even got to build a scale model of our process improvement using Legos and creativity. In my book, that is always a good thing. The negative part was the Lean facilitator. His manager was well known to all of us as just not a great manager. She would talk down to you one second and then compliment your presentation in the next. She was unpredictable, mean, and insincere. So I know he felt the pressure to get data up to the stakeholders of this project and because of this, some things were rushed, overlooked, and just wrong. We didn’t have all of the necessary people on the team and when we brought that up we were told that it didn’t matter. Of course it mattered! In the end, we were successful with coming up with an alternative process that would actually save substantial time off the existing process at a relatively low cost to the organization. I ended up taking a job in South Carolina less than two weeks later so I’m not sure what ever happened with the actually implementation.

References:

Denning, S. (2011). The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.