The Wisdom of Teams Creating the High-Performance Organization Author : Jon R. Katzenbach & Douglas K. Smith Publisher : HarperBusiness, 2006 ISBN-10 : 0-06-052200-3 Pages : 320

The Big Idea

Motorola relied heavily on teams to surpass its competition in building the lightest, smallest, and highest-quality cell phones. At 3M, teams are critical to meeting the company’s goal of producing half of each year’s revenues from the previous five years’ innovations. Kodak’s Zebra Team proved the worth of black and white film manufacturing in a world where color is king.

But many companies overlook the potential of teams in turning around lagging profits, entering new markets, and making exciting innovations happen – because they don’t know how to utilize teams successfully. Authors Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith talked with hundreds of people in more than thirty companies to find out where and how teams work best and how to enhance their effectiveness.

They reveal:

• the most important element in team success
• who excels at team leadership… and why they are rarely the most senior people
• why company-wide change depends on teams… and more

The Need for Teams

We believe that teams – real teams, not just the groups that management calls “teams” – should be the basic unit of performance for most organizations, regardless of size. In any situation requiring the real-time combination of multiple skills, experiences, and judgments, a team inevitably gets better results than a collection of individuals operating within confined job roles and responsibilities. Teams are more flexible than larger organizational groupings because they can be more quickly assembled, deployed, refocused, and disbanded, usually in ways that enhance rather than disrupt more permanent structures and processes.

Teams are more productive than groups that have no clear performance objectives because their members are committed to deliver tangible performance results. Teams and performance are an unbeatable combination.

Teams are not the solution to everyone’s current and future organizational needs. They will not solve every problem, enhance every group’s results, nor help top management address every performance challenge. Moreover, when misapplied, they can be both wasteful and disruptive. Nonetheless, teams usually do outperform other groups and individuals. They represent one of the best ways to support the broad-based changes necessary for the high-performing organization. And executives who really

In the end, the wisdom of teams is within the team itself. It is not in creating the high-performance organization, managing transformational change, enforcing corporate performance ethics, or inspiring new dimensions of leadership. It is in a small group of people so committed to something larger than themselves that they will not be denied.

If deep down, you are still not convinced that teams can make a significant difference in performance, we urge you to go see for yourself.

Go to extra lengths to celebrate the victories of the teams in your organization. Reward them for their accomplishments as a team, and do not overlook the power of positive feedback. We all thrive on it.

And when you are fortunate enough to spawn a high performance team, get out of its way, and make sure the rest of the organization is aware of its unique accomplishments and attributes. And should you be fortunate enough to find yourself part of a high performance team, then perform and enjoy!

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