White Papers Archive
  The Accidental Leader
  Its lonely at the top
 
  Ten functions of today's planners
  In our experience, corporate planning departments
 
  Focus Group Results
  Ever wonder how your views on leadership stack up against those of your peers?
 
  The Challenge of Strategy: Seven Lessons
  Managing Major Organizational Change: Key Elements
 
  Of Teams and Teambuilding
  All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
 
  Three Dimensions of Leadership
  Knowledge is the distilled essence of our intuition, corroborated by experience
 
  Having a Great Company
  Want to have a great company? Across all industries and in a surprisingly broad range of economic conditions, only 6% - that’s about one in 17 - consistently out-perform their peers.
 
  Strategic Planning Committee
  Developing an Appropriate Fact-Base for Strategy Making
 
  Managing Major Organizational Change
  These principles give rise to approaches calling for the involvement of larger groups than are typically involved in a change process.
 
  Business Innovation…Table Stakes for "Stayin Alive"
  We often begin engagements with an intergroup competition calling for teams of people to assemble a "product" or achieve a goal by working together toward a "best of breed" solution.
 
  Kipp & Associates

Of Teams and Teambuilding -
“All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy

Much the same can be said of teams. Describing the characteristics of those that work always sounds trite...like platitudes from a Reader’s Digest article on how to raise gifted children. Describing those that don’t, however, is a more challenging task. Their profiles invariably contain qualities unlikely to be found in any other group. “We have some pretty unique personalities” or “you’ve got understand our business to grasp how this group behaves”.

Team Ailments

Dysfunctional teams groups often unwittingly bar the door to change, whether pursued in the guise of strategic planning, reengineering, work redesign or cultural transformation. They handle the inevitable conflicts badly (or not at all), conduct themselves according to unwritten rules that limit their effectiveness and waste time in “violent agreement”. Members bludgeon one another over differences in mindset and style. They tacitly consent not to learn from their collective experience for the sake of keeping peace in the family or “staying safe”. Alternately, everyone speaks his/her mind but no one ever changes it.

Checklist for Effectiveness

The very nature of executive work depends upon the interaction among members. Authenticity is fundamental in this regard... a willingness to speak one’s mind clearly and to support others in doing the same. It also helps if team members agree to bring a whole person to work. One company President we greatly admire claims that the most valuable trait a team can develop is the capacity to be vulnerable with one another. Beyond that, we’ve found a six point framework to be useful in examining the relative “health” of a team:

· Goals...what constitutes “success” for us - in this situation and overall?
· Roles...what’s expected of us; what do we expect of each other?
· Rules...what are our agreements on decision-making, work ethic, follow-through...?
· Relationships...how do we handle conflict, ambiguity, rumor, secrecy, trust...?
· Results...how do we determine performance day to day; what are our “dials”?
· Rewards...what’s in it for us - individually and collectively? Are we ‘OK’ with that?

Teambuilding

Organizational performance can often be enhanced through teambuilding...a term that has come to mean everything from projective tests to hot tubs and folk songs. Without a doubt, groups can gain a great deal from a ropes course or an exchange of Myers-Briggs profiles... if they truly intersect with a particular team’s issues and the leader’s intent. Otherwise, they take on the aspect of a parlor game... entertaining, but unlikely to change anything.

Four Classes

Our experience suggests that there are four good reasons for teambuilding... each of which calls for very different strategies:

· New group formation and improved relationships - self-disclosure exercises; team challenges; temperament or style profiles.
· Problems in group dynamics - conflict management; reflective listening; communication; community building.
· Barriers to goal attainment - role definition; decision protocols; systems thinking.
· Resolution of goals and game plan - business strategy; management philosophy; team charter development.

Lessons Learned

While there are no absolutes where organizational behavior is concerned, a few lessons from our own experience might be useful when trying to enhance the effectiveness of your team:

· Teams are not well served by “psychotherapizing” individual members...publicly or one by one. Serial executive coaching is not teambuilding.
· Removing “bad actors”, while sometimes long overdue, seldom alters group dynamics. It just creates a vacancy.
· Time together in and of itself changes nothing. Teams that have been together for years are no more effective than when they started unless they’ve worked on how they work.ole definition; decision protocols; systems thinking.
· Nothing gets better without follow-up... behavioral contracts; periodic interventions; process checks and the like.
· There is no substitute for emotional maturity.
· Our program.