Managing Teams For Dummies E-Book

Marty Brounstein

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 541

Beschreibung

In the ever-changing world of work, the idea of spending some or all of your time working in teams is becoming more and more common. From solving problems, to tackling projects, to providing organizational leadership, the roles and importance of teams continue to grow. Leading a team is no easy job, but when a team gels, they can far outperform traditional work groups. Managing Teams For Dummies is for anyone who has been asked to take on the role of team leader. This book can help you manage your team, whether you're a senior manager or worker who doesn't have supervisory responsibilities, but has become the point person on a specific project. Managing Teams For Dummies can help you build and lead high-performing teams. Packed with tips on setting and reaching goals, resolving conflicts, leading teams through change, and providing team members with the skills to work together productively, this book will help you keep any team you mange focused and efficient. Managing Teams For Dummies will also: * Take you beyond the conceptual idea of teams and provide practical advice for developing groups that become winning teams * Describe the type of leadership needed to guide teams successfully and prepare you for challenges that arise * Reveal the three cornerstones' model for developing team success and provide how-to strategies to make them happen * Discuss the types of teams that are growing in popularity, namely self-directed teams, project teams, and task teams Teams make it possible to bring together the variety of skills, perspectives, and talents that you need in the contemporary workplace. With Managing Teams For Dummies you can make sure your team performs to the best of its ability and while trying to achieve its goal.

Leseprobe

Managing Teams For Dummies

by Marty Brounstein

Managing Teams For Dummies®

Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2009 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Library of Congress Control Number: 2002108098

ISBN: 0-7645-5408-5

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4

Dedication

To the first team that I was a part of, from a very young age. Over the years we’ve grown busy with our lives and families and moved miles apart so that we seldom all get together. Sadly we’ve lost our wonderful team leaders, Goldie and Cyril, to whom I dedicated my previous two books For Dummies. But despite the years and distance, my original team remains intact and in touch — in fact, our chain letter has lived on for at least 25 years. I am eternally grateful to this original team — my siblings. So with much love, I dedicate this book to my brother Rick and my sisters Sheri and Julie.

Author’s Acknowledgments

I want to pass on my thanks to a few people who helped make this book become a reality. First, I want to thank Norm Crampton, my project editor, who provided seamless guidance and support in the writing of this book. Despite changes at the publishing company through the year, Norm was the constant and someone easy to work with. I want to acknowledge as well Tere Drenth. She provided great assistance to me in my first two projects For Dummies and taught me the style that made this book go smoothly.

I also want to thank Holly McGuire, the editor who has gotten to know me and my work, for providing my third opportunity to be an author in the For Dummies series. She signed me up for this book. Holly has moved on from Wiley, but I know her talents and down-to-earth style and care are greatly missed.

My appreciation also goes out to Carl Welte, a fellow management consultant and colleague. Carl once again played the role of technical reviewer for my book. His experience and expertise in my business make his involvement in this project a must. Thanks again for all your help.

About the Author

Marty Brounstein is the Principal of the Practical Solutions Group, a training and consulting firm based in the San Francisco Bay area that specializes in management and organizational effectiveness. Marty’s consulting work includes one-on-one coaching with managers and executives, assistance to groups working to become productive teams, and guidance and direction for organizations establishing practices for high performance and employee retention. His training programs target management as well as employee-development issues including leadership, team development, customer service, and effective communications.

As a consultant, speaker, and trainer since 1991, Marty has served a wide variety of organizations from high tech to government, for-profit to not-for-profit. He has a bachelor’s degree in education and history and a master’s degree in industrial relations. Prior to beginning his consulting career, he spent a couple of years as a human resources executive.

This is Marty’s fifth book and third For Dummies book. He is the author of Coaching and Mentoring For Dummies; Communicating Effectively For Dummies; and Handling the Difficult Employee: Solving Performance Problems. He is the coauthor of Effective Recruiting Strategies: A Marketing Approach.

To contact Marty regarding consulting, speaking, or training services, call 650-341-8001 or e-mail him at [email protected].

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our Dummies online registration form located at www.dummies.com/register/.

Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development

Project Editor: Norm Crampton

Acquisitions Editor: Pam Mourouzis

Copy Editor: Neil Johnson

Technical Editor: Carl Welte

Editorial Manager: Christine Beck

Editorial Assistant: Melissa Bennett

Cover Photos: © R. W. Jones/Corbis

Composition

Project Coordinator: Dale White

Layout and Graphics: Scott M. Bristol, Sean Decker, Kelly Hardesty, Joyce Haughey, Jackie Nicholas, Stephanie D. Jumper, Jacque Schneider

Proofreaders: TECHBOOKS Production Services, John Greenough, Andy Hollandbeck, Carl Pierce, Linda Quigley

Indexer: Aptara

Publishing and Editorial for Consumer Dummies

Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher, Consumer Dummies

Joyce Pepple, Acquisitions Director, Consumer Dummies

Kristin A. Cocks, Product Development Director, Consumer Dummies

Michael Spring, Vice President and Publisher, Travel

Publishing for Technology Dummies

Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher

Composition Services

Gerry Fahey, Vice President of Production Services

Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services

Contents

Title

Introduction

About This Book

Conventions Used in This Book

How This Book Is Organized

Icons Used in This Book

Where to Go from Here

Part I : Getting Into Teams

Chapter 1: Recognizing a Business Team When You See One

Giving “Team” a Business Meaning

Telling the Difference between Work Groups and Teams

How Teams Help Managers to Manage

Introducing the Most Common Types of Teams

Looking Before You Leap: Factors to Consider in Adopting Teams

Chapter 2: Creating a Team Culture: Going Beyond the Magic Wand

Understanding “The Terrible Twenty” — Why Teams Sometimes Struggle

Spotting Resistance

Winning Them Over

Introducing the Three Cornerstones: Focus, Cohesiveness, Accountability

Training Your Team in Six Critical Skills

Part II : Leadership for Team Success

Chapter 3: Leading Teams as a Coach

Working as a Coach, Not as a Doer or Boss

Leading by Example

Looking Ahead While You Keep the Team Focused on the Here and Now

Making Things Happen as a Catalyst and Advocate

Chapter 4: Leading Teams through Change

Instant Coffee, Instant Team? Managing the Transition

Hanging on When Business Changes Set Teams Spinning

Pushing Roadblocks Out of the Way

Part III : Strategies for Building Productive Teams

Chapter 5: The Focus Cornerstone: Seeing Where the Team Is Going, and How

Laying a Solid Foundation Before Building the Whole House

Goals and Roles, Like Bread and Butter

Making Plans, Assigning Roles

Double Dosing the V’s: Vision and Values

Chapter 6: Everyone Working Together: The Cohesiveness Cornerstone

Hipbone’s Connected to the . . . Building Connections

Putting Team Guidelines into Action

Adding Adhesive to the Cohesive: Learning and Building Together

Training and Learning Together

Working the Process So You Can Process the Work

Getting Into Team Building

Exercising without Breaking into a Sweat

Chapter 7: Taking Responsibility: The Accountability Cornerstone

Evaluating the Team’s Progress and Results

Reporting Results Outward and Upward

Evaluating Team Performance

Peer Feedback: Rating Each Other’s Performance

Reinforcing Good Performance

Part IV : Developing Tools for Productive Team Players

Chapter 8: Communicating: Listening and Speaking at Your Best

Listening Effectively: There’s More Than Meets the Eye and the Ear

Making Active Listening Work for Your Team

Speaking So That People Listen — and Get Your Point

Making Assertive Speaking Work for You

Chapter 9: Problem-solving and Planning: Adding Method to the Madness

Planning the Work, Working the Plan

Solving Problems (Rather than Making Them Worse)

Brainstorming — Developing Ideas for Solutions

Guiding Discussions After the Brainstorming

Chapter 10: Resolving Conflicts on the Team

Streamlining Toward Solutions

Reaching for Some Handy Tools to Fix Conflicts

Resolving Conflicts the Old-Fashioned Way

Chapter 11: Making Decisions as a Team

Contrasting the Ways that Decisions Are Made in Groups

Reaching a True Consensus

Following the Consultative Route

Selecting the Right Decision-making Tool for the Situation

Chapter 12: Making the M Word (Meetings) Meaningful

Meetings: Why Some Are Called #@!&¿§!

Giving Your Meetings New Life

Next on the Agenda: Developing Focused Agendas

Facilitating a Productive Meeting: Tools and Outcomes

Part V : Managing Some Tougher Team Matters

Chapter 13: Managing Without Supervisors: Self-Directed Teams

Defining and Dissecting a Self-directed Team

Moving Time: Making the Transition to Self-directed Teams

Building Teams to Self-Manage and Grow

Chapter 14: Managing Project Teams and Task Teams to Success

Beginning with the Essentials for Effective Project Management

Starting a Task Team on the Same Page

Keeping a Team on the Productive Track

Managing with Influence Rather than Authority

Chapter 15: Show Us the Money: Incentives and Other Rewards for Teams

Getting the Incentive for Team Incentive Pay

Rewarding Individual Team Members: Skill-Based Pay

Showing You Love Them in Other Ways

Part VI : The Part of Tens

Chapter 16: Ten Tips for Management Groups to Work as Teams

Spell Out the Need and Expectations

Get Everyone in Line: Draft a Purpose Statement and Guidelines

Work on Organizational-level Issues

Set Organizational Priorities and Tie In Group Plans

Conduct Periodic Business Review

Play “Switch” with Team Members

Set Direction and Define Parameters

Evaluate the Team’s Progress

Reinforce Good Team Playership

Retreat Periodically

Chapter 17: Ten Tips for Getting a Team Back on Track

Assess — Figure Out Where You Are

Solve Problems

Address Conflicts

Develop Teamwork

Clarify and Reset Team Goals

Regularly Review Status

Lead the Battle against Outside Obstacles

Evaluate the Full Team, Quarterly

Deal with Individual Performance Issues

Manage by Plan

Chapter 18: Ten Qualities of an Effective Team Player

Demonstrates Reliability

Communicates Constructively

Listens Actively

Functions as an Active Participant

Shares Openly and Willingly

Cooperates and Pitches In to Help

Exhibits Flexibility

Works as a Problem-solver

Treats Others in a Respectful and Supportive Manner

Shows Commitment to the Team

: Further Reading

Introduction

I n the ever-changing world of work, the idea of spending some or all your time working in teams is becoming more and more common. From solving problems, to tackling projects, to providing organizational leadership, the roles and importance of teams continue to grow.

Leading a team — a collection of individuals — is no easy job, however. Teams are a means for getting work done but they’re not a guarantee of success. They produce far better results when team members work well together than when they don’t. Getting your team members to work well together is no small feat.

But when teams gel, they can far outperform traditional work groups. Teams make it possible to bring together the variety of skills, perspectives, and talents that you need in the contemporary workplace. In fact, teams are becoming more and more vital for helping business organizations to achieve their objectives. Leading people to work together effectively in teams is the topic of this book.

About This Book

This book is written for you — managers at all levels who have some form of work group that you’re trying to lead as a team. In many cases, this group o people reports directly to you. They may be nonmanagement employees, supervisors, or managers who report to you as part of your department, or executives who report to you as part of senior management for the whole organization. They’re your staff and you’re their boss. If you have the need and desire for them to work together as a team, Managing Teams For Dummies is your reference and guide.

This book also is written for anyone, manager or not, who is asked to take on the role of team leader. Your team members don’t report to you — you’re not their supervisor. But for some work reason, such as a project, you’re spending time together and you are the person designated to make the team run and produce good results. So although you don’t have direct supervisory authority over the team members, you still bear all management responsi- bility for the team.

Managing Teams For Dummies also applies to senior level management people who sponsor teams. Although you may not run a team directly yourself, you’re spearheading the efforts of your managers who are leading teams, and you need to be able to coach and support them.

Even team members who don’t have a leadership role can benefit from this book. Many of the strategies and skills you find here can help you to perform well as a team member and to support your manager. In short, this book is a practical guide for everyone with a role to play in making teams produce good results — your resource for meeting this major challenge.

Conventions Used in This Book

Throughout this book, the word team has a particular meaning. Though many people refer to their work groups as teams, I do not use team to denote just any kind of work group. In this book, team means a group organized to work together that shares an overall common purpose or role and shares responsibility for the outcomes of the whole group. A team is an interdependent, coordinated group of people. Unlike regular work groups in which people take responsibility primarily for their own area of work, team denotes people relying on one another for organizing and carrying out all the team’s work and producing the outcomes expected by the whole group.

Team building as used in this book is different from the way that many people use the term. In the broad sense of this book, team building means the whole effort and campaign to lead a team to perform well together — an ongoing responsibility for the life of a team. In a more limited sense, team building is one strategy among a large package of team development efforts that enhance working relationships for strengthening team cohesiveness. But I do not use team building in this book to refer to those group activities of play and fun — often done off the work site — that are meant to transform everyone into one big happy unit. There’s nothing wrong with big happy units, but they’re not necessarily teams.

The terms manager and team leader are often used interchangeably in this book. They refer to the role of the person who’s running and leading the team.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is organized into six main parts. Here’s an overview of what you can find in each part:

Part I: Getting Into Teams

Part I contains the first two chapters of the book — the conceptual foundation of the whole book. I talk about what teams are and the common types of teams that exist in business organizations, and I distinguish between ordinary work groups and genuine teams, pointing out the key differences. Part I also reminds you why teams flounder and why simply wishing a team into existence is not enough to help make it perform productively. No magic wands or special pills exist for turning a team into a productive unit. But your leadership in building a team structure on the three cornerstones — focus, cohesiveness, and accountability — can produce success, and I show you how.

Part II: Leadership for Team Success

This part defines your leadership role in running teams effectively. Chapter 3 introduces the concept of leading your teams as a coach, which is a critical theme for the whole book. I explain what leading as a coach means and how it’s different from being the boss or supervisor who’s a good worker or doer.

In Chapter 4, you gain tips and strategies for helping lead a team through its early stages of development. It’s naïve to expect every transition into a team structure to go smoothly, and this part prepares you to handle the challenge. Chapter 4 contains coaching tips for dealing with the team member behavior and performance problems that sometimes arise as teams take shape.

Part III: Strategies for Building Productive Teams

This third part of the book takes the model of the three cornerstones for team success — focus, cohesiveness, and accountability — and develops them one chapter at a time. You gain a depth of practical knowledge and tools for applying the strategies associated with each cornerstone. You can pick and choose the tools you think best fit your teams, but the idea here is to build upon all three cornerstones. Teams that have a high level of focus, cohesiveness, and accountability work well together and produce strong results.

Part IV: Developing Tools for Productive Team Players

Teams need members who can work well together to accomplish the team’s work — otherwise known as good team players. But the skills of a good team player are seldom taught to most people in grade school or high school. School kids are often well conditioned to work independently but aren’t necessarily equipped to work collaboratively, the way they must work as team members.

Part IV focuses on giving you these essential team skills — effective interpersonal communication, planning, problem-solving, conflict resolution, shared decision making, and organizing and running meetings. The chapters are written like instructional guides. If you want to, you can discover the skills right along with your team members.

Part V: Managing Some Tougher Team Matters

Part V explores three of the more challenging team management situations: self-directed teams, project teams/task teams, and alternative team-compensation systems.

As the name implies, a self-directed team has no manager in charge. A project team or task team often is cross-functional and exists only until its project or task is complete. The compensation topic can be just as challenging as the other two, involving incentives, bonuses, and skill-based pay, not to mention rewarding good team performance through noncash means. Part V offers you many tips and strategies on all these topics.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

This last part of the book consists of three short chapters containing useful tips and insights on other team-related issues: leading a management team, getting a team back on track when its performance slips, and recognizing effective team members when you see them.

Icons Used in This Book

Throughout this book you may notice small graphics in the margins, called icons. These symbols are meant to grab your attention in particular ways, as I explain:

This icon signifies practical ideas and points that help you put into practice what you’re reading.

This icon identifies a thought worth keeping in mind as you manage your teams.

A red flag about what not to do in running teams.

An “aha” idea or insight meant to stimulate your thoughts about managing teams.

A how-to skill that can help your team members on the job.

A teaching tip to help you translate team management theory into understandable information

Where to Go from Here

This book is written so that each chapter stands on its own. So if you like to skip around and explore team topics as they come to mind, you can easily do so without being out of place. Sometimes I refer to points, terms, and skills covered in other chapters, making it easy for you to fill in information when you need to. One suggestion: You may want to start by reading Chapters 1 and 2 because they lay the foundation for the rest of the book. Enjoy your journey!

Part I

Getting Into Teams

In this part . . .

Part I shows you what a real team is and how it’s different from a regular work group. This section also explores some of the factors that give teams trouble, and you see why simply wishing a team to succeed doesn’t guarantee anything. I also introduce you to a model to guide you in building a strong team, and I explain the skills that you want your team members to learn so that they can work well together.

Chapter 1

Recognizing a Business Team When You See One

In This Chapter

Defining “team”

Identifying work groups that look like teams but aren’t

Understanding how organizations use teams to get work done

Itemizing your concerns as you move into teams

E veryone knows what a team is. You understood instantly as a school kid when you were chosen as captain and got to pick your team for the kickball game at recess. Maybe you also played soccer or were on the school basketball or baseball team.

Adults love teams, too. I’ll bet you have a favorite team that you cheer for: win or lose (Go Cubs!). Yes, you know what teams are — they’re the heart and soul of sports. For many people, the whole idea of team is based on the sports model.

More and more these days, you see another model of team that is associated with the way employees spend their time in the workplace. Many of us work in some kind of team from 9 to 5 — it’s a growing trend in private- and public-sector organizations.

But when it comes to the workplace, you can throw away most of the sports analogies. For one thing, not everyone plays sports or is a fan. More to the point, asking people to work in teams isn’t the same as choosing sides for kickball. The goals of work teams are usually more expansive than merely beating an opponent (though I have some things to say elsewhere about beating the competition).

The sports analogy, in fact, breaks down very early when you transport it to the business scene. Think about it: In professional sports like the NFL or NBA, potential team members must compete against one another to make the team or win a starting position. And though they wear the same jerseys and cooperate on plays, the pros have to show in every game that they’re worthy to remain on the team. That’s competition.