Secrets To Team Work Creativity And Success 

Get the practical bottom-line steps you can use now to help teams with diverse members produce excellent team work. It only takes a few simple changes to how you may be doing things to help teams perform better.  

As a quick review in my past articles we covered: common mistakes, how people different cultural environments affects team work, how a business’s culture affects performance, and the dangerous of being harmonious at the expense of producing the best possible results. If you missed these articles you’ll want to get the valuable information they have.  

Diversity Is No Guarantee To Successful Team Work 

If you have been keeping up on the articles you’ll like remember that one of the major cause of interpersonal team conflict is cultural differences. Now pay attention to my definition, a cultural difference can range from living in a different region of a country to what might surprise you – coming from a different family. 

Here’s what I’m getting at, differences don’t always have to be about one person being from China and the other person being from New Zealand. It can be as simple as one person being raised in a liberal household and another being raised in in conservative household.  

Is this making sense to you? Core value and perpetual differences can and do happen in one’s own country especially in the U.S. as we are becoming increasingly polarized. This in turn can lead to interpersonal rather than task related conflict. 

Don’t miss this, the interpersonal conflict is generally extremely unhealthy for team work and business. It often results in private agendas that are fulfilled at the expense of the company.

You don’t have to be in the world long to know this fact.  Most of you are acutely aware how much more governments and corporations would get done if it weren’t for infighting.

Here’s a step you can take to minimize the effects of interpersonal conflict:

• Make it an inflexible ground rule that criticism is only fair when applied to an idea not a person or a group.  

Here’s a step you can take to encourage teams to take intelligent risks:

• recognize when team risk taking results in even small successes (Shin, Kim, Lee & Bain, 2012).
•  giving teams the freedom to fail (Shin, Kim, Lee & Bain, 2012) by applauding sound decision making and reasonable risks that simply don’t work out. Remember there are a multitude of reasons why a great idea and even superb execution can end in failure.

Here’s Your Real Enemy

Listen any commodity trader or security trader who’s successful can tell you risks is manageable. Risks are not the enemy. It is the miss managing of risks that cause problems.  

Here’s a review of how to successfully lead or manage teams. Encourage risk taking, celebrate small victories, and set in place a risk management strategy that will allow you to cut short losses and ride successes to large financial profits. 

By quelling personal attacks and rewarding carefully thought out risks you’ll soon have team work that reflects successful leadership and produces high performing results. Be sure and leave a comment and return to learn more about getting the best out of teams with diverse members.

Stay hungry for excellence, 

Alex  

Reference: 

SHIN, S. J., KIM, T., LEE, J., & BIAN, L. (2012). COGNITIVE TEAM DIVERSITY AND INDIVIDUAL TEAM MEMBER CREATIVITY: A CROSS-LEVEL INTERACTION. Academy Of Management Journal, 55(1), 197-212. doi:10.5465/amj.2010.0270

Here’s How You Can Keep Your Team From Costly Mistakes 

If you’re like me and believe knowing where the booby traps are is key to winning the battle to creating high performance team work you’ll want to read today’s post. It really is written from the stand point of entrepreneurial stand points; however, many of the pitfalls he mentions can be cross applied to any team, so you won’t want to miss this article.  

10 Common Pitfalls Inexperienced Teams Make 

Avoid Falling Prey

Steve Tobak whose blog is on CBS’s Money watch wrote an interesting post on the ten pitfalls of inexperienced management teams. They are really 11 he gives a bonus right up front which is listen to the voice of experience. Or as I would put it learn by observation rather than experience if the experience is going to cost you some hide.  

Here are his 10 (Tobak, 2011): 

1. Thinking you’ve got it all figured out.
2. Failing to say no to opportunities.
3. Staying the course too long.
4. Hiring other inexperienced executives.
5. Hiring executives just for their experience.
6. Under scoping the challenges of scaling the business.
7. Failing to moderate risk-taking.
8. Suddenly becoming overly risk averse.
9. Lack of marketing competence.
10. Going public too soon. 

4 Novice Team Work Traits To Guard Against

If you are overseeing any inexperienced team there are causes underlying each of these errors that you’ll want to steer the team away. Four traits you want your team to avoid:  

1. Hubris
2. Fear
3. Greed
4. Unconscious incompetence  

I’m betting you recognize these traits are common to any novice. Colleges had it right when they termed 1^st year college students sophomores. Sophomore means, wise fools.  

The quote, which I’m paraphrasing, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” defines the predicament of a sophomore. Unfortunately, Steve did not give the remedy in his article for inexperience.  

There is no need to fear. I have a few general pointers that as soon as you see them you’ll think “Great Scot, Alex has a talent for stating the obvious!”  

You would be right in saying that, but pay attention to my next point. People all too often over look the obvious so it is necessary to, “Hit the nail a few times to drive it home.” 

Simply Follow These 4 Easy Steps And You’ll Insure Team Work Success 

Stay with me, here is what you must do to head off inexperienced people crashing and burning.  

Don’t micromanage. Now this will be hard not to do; but the team, if you’ve delegated appropriately, ought to be up to the challenge with a little guidance and encouragement.  

Ask open ended questions to guide their thinking.  

Set an agenda that includes performance expectations and timelines. 

Set a reporting schedule that will allow you to get insight into what the team is doing so you can catch them before they make a costly error; and debrief so the team has time to reflect on success and set backs for the purpose of the team learning from both types of experiences.  

Stated in an over simplified manner, be a parent to the group but not a helicopter parent. If you do this you’ll soon have the team giving forth high performance team work and you’ll be demonstrating successful leadership. 

If you don’t want to see these articles disappear remember to tell Google (click on the plus sign) you like my article (takes only a second), and tell a few friends (it only takes a few more seconds – use my easy “Share” button).  

Stay hungry for excellence, 

Alex  

Reference: 

Tobak, S. (2011). Top 10 Pitfalls of Inexperienced Management Teams. CBS Money Watch Retrieved from http://cbsn.ws/FOr8IT on May 9, 2012