Developing High Impact Teams

Teamwork: Developing High Impact Teams1

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Tony Lingham, Ph.D.

Bonnie A. Richley, Ph.D.

December 2013

Organizations are increasingly done through projects involving teams across all levels as they offer greater flexibility, better outcomes and better innovation than individuals. As such, teams permeate all levels in local, national and global organizations. Such a design means that people often have membership in multiple teams resulting in outcomes that are frequently

suboptimal and fraught with frustration and inefficiencies. The demand for increased teamwork has created a need for a way to help teams succeed yet most training programs do not take into account the full experience of team life in development efforts. In this entry the authors propose a conceptual framework to develop High Impact Teams. A High Impact Team is one that is: 1. Aware and has the ability to align actual and desired interaction (quality of team interaction); and

2. Has the knowledge and ability to harness the innovative and executional capacities of their team within its embedded organizational or educational contexts. This entry posits that

meaningful team development programs must incorporate assessments of both the quality of a team’s interaction (function) and its capacity to innovate and execute (performance). The authors provide a structured methodology involving measures of interaction and capacities together with engaging in well-developed team coaching process so that teams will be able to develop and become high impact teams.

Team Life in Organizations and Educational Settings

A recent study reported in the Gallup Business Journal that reviewed 10,640 projects from 200 companies in 30 countries and across various industries found that only 2.5% of the 1 This paper has been submitted to an international encyclopedia published by SAGE. The authors were invited to submit a paper to this journal based on the significance and cutting edge nature of their work.

teams successfully completed 100% of their projects. Yet most work in organizations continues 2 to be done in teams (e.g., top management, ad hoc, departmental) leading to a critical need for a way to help them to succeed. However, the current landscape of training programs fail to provide a holistic approach to team life centered on learning, guided by a structured methodology, and supported by team-level assessments and coaching.

Parallels can be made in education when students report that they understand the need to be able to work in teams but are seldom coached on team issues, which could lead to fractured relationships, continuous frustration, and poor performance. Not infrequently, however, student teams deliver high quality work even with poor team dynamics. In these cases students often “bracket” the dysfunction and divide the work or a strong leader emerges who takes on most of the effort. We cannot ignore the continuum of team experiences ranging from dysfunctional, to average, to the less often reported high performing events. In both scenarios, in the workplace or classroom, a deficit exists in understanding how to help individuals learn about how to survive and thrive in team life usually because of the absence of team expertise and a reliable structured process. Research and practice domestically and internationally and with for-profit and non-profit organizations over the past 10 years using this structured process has proven that

successful high quality teamwork involves a continuous razor-sharp focus on factors associated with relationality, task, and leadership and also involves assessments of both the quality of a team’s interaction (function) and its capacity to innovate and execute (performance).

This entry is structured in three sections: 1. A brief discussion of the broad shifts and development in team research followed by the those that begin to explore and promote theoretical approaches to examine the multiple facets of team experience/interaction and highlight a viable theoretical framework; 2. A review of Lingham’s (2005) Team Learning

Inventory (TLI) followed by an explanation of how it assesses the different aspects of team interaction, capacity for innovation, and task execution; and 3. An overview of how this 3

structured methodology has been used in research and practice in organizational and educational settings and how such a method could be of value to educational institutions and organizations. The Broad Shifts and Development in Team Research

Early team research and leadership studies established that interactions between team members and between leaders and followers exist in a task-relational continuum. As team studies evolved, researchers began to peel apart this continuum and started to focus on the

diverse variables embedded in teams from an input-process-output perspective. Such empirical studies, however, have been bifurcated. On the one hand, some researchers argue that team life is complex and can best be understood by zooming in on specific aspects such as decision

making, team learning, the effect of time on teams, and leadership in teams. On the other hand, other researchers have also presented the importance of understanding teams as a whole. Such integrative perspectives, though less popular since the 1950s, have been steadily growing in recent years. Some examples are McGrath’s Time, Interaction and Performance (TIP) model published in 1991; change processes in groups; and group communication. However, at the turn of the century, team researchers conceptually converged on a view of teams as complex, adaptive and dynamic systems focusing on the importance of team interaction; that teams experience emergent states; and that these states create the context in which future interactions occur. Assessing and Mapping the Quality of Team Interaction and Team Innovative and Execution Capacities using The Team Learning Inventory (TLI)

Based on research conducted over the past 10 years, a high impact team is one that

understands the quality of their interaction (functioning), their ability to innovate and

implement/execute tasks (performance), and their need for power and influence (i.e., leadership).

4 What follows is a discussion of how the Team Learning Inventory (TLI) helps teams to develop the two aspects of interaction and executional capacities.

Quality of Team Interaction. The quality of a team’s interaction is based on its awareness of their actual versus desired experience. Based on previous research done, team interaction is captured in four major dimensions: Diverging, Converging, Power and Influence and Openness. The non-task or Diverging dimension of tem interaction is defined as the extent to which a team is

engaged in valuing/connecting with one another and where team members have the freedom to be individuals who can relate to all members. This interaction is driven by the desire to build healthy relationships and includes five aspects of team interaction: Engagement, Active Listening, Individuality, Relationality and Solidarity.

The Converging dimension is defined as the extent to which the team engages in

decisions and is driven by agendas or directions. This interaction is task or purpose focused. The Converging dimension of team interaction is experienced as those that help the team accomplish a goal or objective and includes: Understanding, Action, and Planning.

A team’s Power and Influence dimension of team interaction is defined as the extent to which members of the team have equal ability and opportunity to influence and contribute. Finally, the Openness dimension is defined as the extent to which members focus on issues or ideas that are of interest or concern to individual members or to the group as a whole whether or not if they are related to the task.

Figure 1 below illustrates an example of the mapping of one team’s quality of

interactions based on the previously explicated dimensions. The blue line represents the team’s actual state and the red line signifies its desired state at that point in time. The overall quality of the team’s interaction is reflected in the alignment between the actual and desired states,

5 meaning the closer they are in all dimensions the better the team experience. Being aware of the

quality of a team’s interaction is the first step toward developing a high performing team.

Figure 1. The Mapping of Actual and Desired States Indicating the Quality of Team Interaction of a

Team

Innovative and Implementation/Execution Capacities. A team’s innovative capacity is the ability its members have to generate, assess, and build ideas with the goal to craft a feasible design for execution. The ability to generate a high quantity and quality of ideas is labeled as Ideation. This process, though similar to brainstorming, also requires that individuals in the team are open to a wide breadth of ideas while looking for linkages or associations within these thoughts to be able to reach better and more integrative and/or creative solutions. The ability to be able to select and to design projects based on what is expected and by what can be actualized is labeled as

Synthesis and Selection. This process requires a team to be able to develop a clear understanding of objectives, constraints, while simultaneously being open to possibilities generated during the