For a team to function well, leaders need to focus on the right things when designing and supporting those teams (Colan, 2008). In a team, the leader is responsible for establishing a trajectory and them keeping up with the help of the member’s success; he is not responsible for keeping an eye on members every time. For this reason, no leader can effectively manage how a team behaves. What all leaders do is creating a conducive environment that can lead to the success of each member of the group. In any case scenario, any team has its up and down times. In most cases, leadership actions are implemented when a team is beginning, others are effectively done when the team is in a particular work routine while others do the implementation when it’s all over.
It’s of great significance when leadership initiatives are done right when the team is still young to avoid cases of backfiring. Ensuring a conducive environment for your members right from the word go enhances the leadership skills embraced by the team. Mostly, the person that puts all this in place is often considered the team leader. Although it doesn’t have to be necessarily a team member, it can be an external manager or even a consultant from an outside group. In most case scenarios, it does not matter who creates the conditions for team prosperity. The most crucial thing is that conditions put in place foster the success of the team and stay there to be respected by every member.
Understanding socio-cultural factors surrounding each and every member is a vital element towards ensuring the success of the team and the team’s integration. Though other socio-cultural factors do influence the integration of the team, building healthy relationships with a team, slowly counts as part of success for that team. It ensures effectiveness and how members relate whether in an in-group state or out-group. What happens in organizations is that most members are put into groups by how each one performs a particular task. “The way Passionate Performance can be ignited in your team can be unique as your team’s culture.”(Colan, 2008, pg. 21). Regardless to this, members find it hard to perform duties due to their in-groups and out-group differences. Normally, it's hard to convince workmates to perform tasks collectively as long as they are perceived as out-groups to a team. In fact, if members were given the opportunity to select a team, then all would be based on friendship. Task accomplishment is undermined as compared to the interpersonal harmony that close people have. For this reason, team members who don’t really like one another find it hard to accomplish tasks together. Members who seem to interfere with the group’s interpersonal harmony are counted as out bounds.
Effective teamwork is all based on cohesive bonds between members. Members of a particular team who value their status in the group find it very hard to share personal opinions to members to retain their sovereignty. This leads to the degradation of the team in regards to their task-completion effectiveness. They think that if someone in the group holds such kind of information, they are prone to get overthrown from their duties as team leaders. “The key to turning volunteers into “owners” is found within the hearts and minds of your employees.”(Colan, 2008, pg.13). Moreover, in-group rivalry occurs when members do their very best to attain superiority in the team. The disadvantageous aspect in all this is that these groups lead to a group thinking the way of doing things to most members rendering some of them weak and voiceless to the team. This cripples some individual’s personality.
Members of a particular team who perform tasks as group members expect hardly receive negative feedbacks. Furthermore, if a member gets negative remarks from the team members, he or she takes it personally. The criticism made in public mostly hurts an individual and this may, in the long run, tarnish the latter’s image. In most cases, that group member aims to fight back with the aim of destructing the group’s process. Group members rarely give disliking feedbacks in an open manner. This is all avoided to retain the cohesive nature. Furthermore, putting under-performing members in the view of higher management portfolios is considered unethical and immoral amongst team members. For this reason, most low-performers in a group choose to hide and go unnoticed in most cases.
In most circumstances, lazing happens to groups that there are no consequences to under-performers. In most cases, group members choose to protect the under-performing members from the higher management's wrath. Group members who rely on the “backing up” philosophy among members encourages lazing in the group. All this narrows down to how tasks are assigned to a particular group that is working together. Tasks should be explicitly assigned to members to avoid chances of some giving excuses that don’t make sense.
This makes self-presentation such an important concern for individuals. Some of the members may choose to contribute actively to a discussion since they are so much concerned with how the group’s members perceive them. The manner in which members of a certain group understand an individual acts as a determining factor on whether one joins or leaves the group. In most cases, evaluation seems to come to play when one chooses to act contrary to what other members of the group expect. Evaluation apprehension is an actual hindering factor towards the innovative state and creativity of working with teams.
In learning cultures, well functional teams, have members who learn together and learn how to learn together. Team members help each other achieve a common purpose and hold each other accountable for doing so. If a team’s purpose is to feed homeless families, then team members help each other in collecting, preparing and distributing necessary recourses such as food and communicating the expectations that everyone on the team will contribute in some way to the achievement of this goal. Members of the team will fill any gaps in their resources. As they do such tasks, group members learn how to work together, learn from each other, improve their job, and succeed.
Both work groups and teams are an opportunity for learning. However, there is a difference. The more powerful structure for learning is the actual team. The team is dependent on organizational learning for their success. Learning in a group refers to how members interact and perceive one another’s idea to enhance effectiveness in the way they perform tasks. “To become a more engaging leader, making it a priority to get to know your employees.” (Colan, 2008, pg. 14). However, whether staffs are working together just because they share the same group work, or they are together because their success is determined by their ability to function as a cohesive, coordinated, integrated team unit, both types of groups can learn. Group focused organizational learning enhances the capacity of small groups to act as a unit in the workplace. The members’ collective “know-how” and “know-why” changes the behaviors and effectiveness of the group. Group members are both learning together and learning to learn together.
Connectivity, on the other hand, creates high functioning teams. Connectivity defined by the number and quality of interactions among group members is what creates this environment and makes high preface groups successful. Connectivity is achieved by:
Balancing inquiry—asking questions out of interests in the other people’s ideas, with advocacy –selling your idea, balancing a focus on other with a focus on oneself, and maintaining a high ratio of positive feedback –showing appreciation and encouragement of others to negative comments –showing disapproval, sarcasm or cynicism.
Apparently, teams, with high levels of connectivity, are more successful than those with a low level of connectivity. The inquiry, focus on others and positive feedback, in balance, all necessary for creating an environment in which participants are receptive to new ideas and feedback. A high-performance team will discover through its experience on how to become a more valuable part of the system. This learning builds the capacity of the group to achieve high performance and to help the organization achieve its potentials
In conclusion, it’s necessary for a learning environment to be conducive for those who want to express their ideas, ‘warts and all’ to learn from mistakes, rather than to feel like the one they have to explain or give an excuse for their actions. Team members should listen to the experiences of other and offer careful and constructive support by asking challenging questions and then they should support and recognize changes in individual and group behavior that happen as an outcome of the action learning. As with individual learning, reflective inquiry is critical to learning in teams. Reflective inquiry surfaces evidence of process and result. Such creates awareness among team members of their progress and accomplishments. Through this process of questioning and thoughtful self-examination, a mirror is put up in front of the group. Members can say if they like what they see or if they want to change what they see. Without this reflection, it is difficult for team members and their leaders to learn.
Reference
Colan, L. (2008). Engaging the hearts and minds of all your employees: How to ignite passionate performance for better business results.McGraw-Hill Professional
