A friend who manages a team of software engineers in Silicon Valley tells me, “With a single phone call, any of the people I work with could get a job across town for twenty thousand dollars more a year. But they don’t.” Why?
“I keep it fun.”
The ability to make everyone on a team love what they are doing together is at the heart of team building and team leadership. Studies of the highest- performing self-managing work groups find that a critical mass of their members love working in a group. This “team achievement” outlook is a combination of a shared competitive drive, strong social bonds, and confidence in each other’s abilities. Taken together, these elements add up to what Spencer summarizes as “fast, focused, friendly, self-confident, fun teams.’”
People on such teams tend to share a common motivational pattern. They are competitive and evenhanded in matching members to the best role for their talents. They have a strong affiliative need—they like people for their own sake which makes them more harmonious, better able to handle conflicts and offer mutual support. And rather than seeking power that is purely self-interested, they wield power in the best interests of the group— they share a commitment to the group goal.
These are the kind of teams, Spencer notes, that are increasingly widespread in entrepreneurial high-tech organizations, where quick product development is vital to meeting the competitive pressure of an industry in which the shelf life of a product line is measured in weeks and months.
Just twenty years ago team skills were only threshold abilities, not a trait that defined outstanding leaders. In the 1990s, though, team skills are a defining quality of star performers. At IBM, 80 percent of the time a person’s strength as a team leader predicts “whether someone is a top performer or just average,” Mary Fontaine, of Hay/McBer, told me. “These are people who can create compelling visions, conceptualize their business in an exciting way, articulate it simply and emphatically,” and so inspire others with enthusiasm in their work together.
In a study by the Center for Creative Leadership of top American and European executives whose careers derailed, the inability to build and lead a team was one of the most common reasons for failure.” Team skills, which had been of little consequence in a similar study in the early 1980s, had emerged as a key mark of leadership ten years later. Teamwork became the most frequently valued managerial competence in studies of organizations around the world.’
“The number one challenge for leadership here is getting the heads of our units to play together, to collaborate,” an executive at a Fortune 500 company tells me. That is the great challenge at any level, in any organization. Team abilities come into play anytime people work together toward a common goal, whether in an informal group of three or in an entire corporate division. The demand for team skills will only grow in the coming years, as work revolves more and more around ad hoc groups and virtual organizations, around spontaneous teams that arise and dissolve as the need for them comes and goes—and as tasks become so complex that no one person has all the skills needed to accomplish them.
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