Team Cohesion: A How-To Guide
10 February 2009
Read by 1801 persons
A team must move beyond being a group of individuals and go through successive development phases. Goal: excellence.
Team cohesion is not an end in itself. A company gains efficiency and saves time. The goal is not to make every team member a champion, but to build high-performing, natural work groups.
The Entrepreneur and Their Team
An entrepreneur cannot succeed alone in the long term. They need a high-performing team to implement strategy and motivate the hierarchy. However, a leader shouldn't exercise power in isolation, prioritizing action and results without building a cohesive team. We've identified three types of leaders who neglect building a strong management team:
* The “Player” is driven by challenge or power. A skilled strategist, they use people as means to an end. They may even create or allow conflicts to develop, manipulating them to their advantage. Driven by the thrill of the game, they focus on new challenges (acquisitions, new ventures) rather than building high-performing teams.
* The “Organizer” thinks in terms of structure. They focus on efficient management and information systems. They are more concerned with effective dashboards and easily usable indicators. They want to build a lasting company, often forgetting that people make the difference. They approach their teams solely in terms of results and action plans.
* The “Prophet” is inspired. They have a groundbreaking idea. They work on intuition. Often solitary, they impress with their forward-thinking. They have a long-term vision but fail to connect with those around them. The present doesn't interest them. They're elsewhere.
These portraits are caricatures. Each leader displays varying degrees of these characteristics. To effectively manage a leadership team, you need a leader who genuinely cares about people and has given up on exercising power in isolation.
Stages of Development
Like individuals, groups go through stages of development. A team will go through these stages in a more or less linear way:
Level 1: Operations
The team produces results. They may not question their processes because they feel they've achieved a high level of excellence.
Level 2: Regulation
This stage involves the team's relationships: conflicts (resolved or not), unspoken issues, inappropriate behaviors between members and towards the leader.
Level 3: Learning
The team is more or less a learning team. They transfer and build on knowledge and skills internally. They are proactive in monitoring their environment. Crucially, it's important to look at how they solve problems, aiming to address the root causes as much as the solutions themselves.
Level 4: Meaning
To function optimally – maximizing results with minimal effort – a group must share compatible values, experiences, and perspectives on the world and the company. Formalizing this isn't necessary, but it's often helpful to discuss it.
Level 5: Project
Aware of its strengths and weaknesses and the challenges in its institutional environment, the team must outline its goals in a yearly team plan.
Level 6: Networking
Regular meetings with clients and internal suppliers allow the team to review the relevance of its project and set targets for improvement. They also meet with similar teams in other companies to learn and share experiences.
Level 7: Excellence
The team has reached high performance by expanding its internal skills. They have a project, and the people in the team share values and behaviors that foster synergy...
From Diagnosis to Intervention
Some teams do “team building” without realizing it. They go through these stages in their own order, sometimes implicitly. But, in their own way, they've addressed the issues raised at each stage. For teams that function as groups of individuals, far from excellence, it's easy to identify the blocking stage.
Before developing its business plan, the head of a semi-public office brings his management team on a retreat to build cohesion and motivation, aware of strong tensions within the team and against him. He wants long-term support beyond a short-term event. Using the seven-level framework is helpful for analyzing the support request and selecting appropriate methods.
Meeting each team member to define the intervention and its feasibility, we heard the following:
- “I feel like we're working without visibility. We lack a medium-term vision for the service. We're tackling things on a case-by-case basis.” (level 5)
- “We repeat the same mistakes, or reinvent the wheel. I don't know what Mr. X does. Yet, we work in similar technical areas. Everyone works in silos.” (level 3)
- “Things are discussed in the cafeteria or one-on-one with the boss. When we're together, we hold back what we have to say to each other. Conflicts are unspoken and poorly managed. We're afraid to be open.” (level 2)
PHILIPPE CRUELLAS is a business sociologist, advisor at Arthur Andersen Management, and author of books on time management, coaching, and organizational development. He is also a psychoanalyst.
HUGHES ROY is head of human resources and knowledge management at Arthur Andersen Management. After a career as a financial auditor and consultant, he specialized in supporting human aspects of change management.
Posted February 10
lesechos.fr
Team cohesion is not an end in itself. A company gains efficiency and saves time. The goal is not to make every team member a champion, but to build high-performing, natural work groups.
The Entrepreneur and Their Team
An entrepreneur cannot succeed alone in the long term. They need a high-performing team to implement strategy and motivate the hierarchy. However, a leader shouldn't exercise power in isolation, prioritizing action and results without building a cohesive team. We've identified three types of leaders who neglect building a strong management team:
* The “Player” is driven by challenge or power. A skilled strategist, they use people as means to an end. They may even create or allow conflicts to develop, manipulating them to their advantage. Driven by the thrill of the game, they focus on new challenges (acquisitions, new ventures) rather than building high-performing teams.
* The “Organizer” thinks in terms of structure. They focus on efficient management and information systems. They are more concerned with effective dashboards and easily usable indicators. They want to build a lasting company, often forgetting that people make the difference. They approach their teams solely in terms of results and action plans.
* The “Prophet” is inspired. They have a groundbreaking idea. They work on intuition. Often solitary, they impress with their forward-thinking. They have a long-term vision but fail to connect with those around them. The present doesn't interest them. They're elsewhere.
These portraits are caricatures. Each leader displays varying degrees of these characteristics. To effectively manage a leadership team, you need a leader who genuinely cares about people and has given up on exercising power in isolation.
Stages of Development
Like individuals, groups go through stages of development. A team will go through these stages in a more or less linear way:
Level 1: Operations
The team produces results. They may not question their processes because they feel they've achieved a high level of excellence.
Level 2: Regulation
This stage involves the team's relationships: conflicts (resolved or not), unspoken issues, inappropriate behaviors between members and towards the leader.
Level 3: Learning
The team is more or less a learning team. They transfer and build on knowledge and skills internally. They are proactive in monitoring their environment. Crucially, it's important to look at how they solve problems, aiming to address the root causes as much as the solutions themselves.
Level 4: Meaning
To function optimally – maximizing results with minimal effort – a group must share compatible values, experiences, and perspectives on the world and the company. Formalizing this isn't necessary, but it's often helpful to discuss it.
Level 5: Project
Aware of its strengths and weaknesses and the challenges in its institutional environment, the team must outline its goals in a yearly team plan.
Level 6: Networking
Regular meetings with clients and internal suppliers allow the team to review the relevance of its project and set targets for improvement. They also meet with similar teams in other companies to learn and share experiences.
Level 7: Excellence
The team has reached high performance by expanding its internal skills. They have a project, and the people in the team share values and behaviors that foster synergy...
From Diagnosis to Intervention
Some teams do “team building” without realizing it. They go through these stages in their own order, sometimes implicitly. But, in their own way, they've addressed the issues raised at each stage. For teams that function as groups of individuals, far from excellence, it's easy to identify the blocking stage.
Before developing its business plan, the head of a semi-public office brings his management team on a retreat to build cohesion and motivation, aware of strong tensions within the team and against him. He wants long-term support beyond a short-term event. Using the seven-level framework is helpful for analyzing the support request and selecting appropriate methods.
Meeting each team member to define the intervention and its feasibility, we heard the following:
- “I feel like we're working without visibility. We lack a medium-term vision for the service. We're tackling things on a case-by-case basis.” (level 5)
- “We repeat the same mistakes, or reinvent the wheel. I don't know what Mr. X does. Yet, we work in similar technical areas. Everyone works in silos.” (level 3)
- “Things are discussed in the cafeteria or one-on-one with the boss. When we're together, we hold back what we have to say to each other. Conflicts are unspoken and poorly managed. We're afraid to be open.” (level 2)
PHILIPPE CRUELLAS is a business sociologist, advisor at Arthur Andersen Management, and author of books on time management, coaching, and organizational development. He is also a psychoanalyst.
HUGHES ROY is head of human resources and knowledge management at Arthur Andersen Management. After a career as a financial auditor and consultant, he specialized in supporting human aspects of change management.
Posted February 10
lesechos.fr
