Best Practices_ Managing People_ Secrets to Leading for New Managers - Barry Silverstein [15]
CASE FILE
HOW DO TEAMS AFFECT A BUSINESS?
To find out, economics professor Derek C. Jones and his colleague Takao Kato spent 35 months doing in-depth interviews and surveys and even shadowing workers at a fast-growing light manufacturing firm that makes parts for other businesses.
The CEO of the multinational company that owned the firm believed in teams and had initiated a teaming program throughout the manufacturing plant.
When Jones and Kato analyzed individual team members’ daily output of parts, the number rejected because of poor quality, and the number of “downtime” hours consumed by nonproduction-related job activities, the findings were startling. Initially, individual productivity among team members increased significantly—by about 3 percent—and rejection rates dropped more than 25 percent.
In fact, for those whom management had invited to join the teams, the overall benefits were lasting. And these statistics measure only the team membership’s impact on the productivity of individual workers, apart from workplace improvements the teams had developed.
SOURCE: “The Effects of Employee Involvement on Firm Performance” by Derek C. Jones and Takao Kato, The William Davidson Institute (September 2003).
DEFINING ROLES ON TEAMS
It’s important to realize that the team you build is made up of people, each of whom has unique skills, experience, capabilities, and talents. A smart manager who wants to build a successful team assesses each individual’s strengths and leverages them to maximum advantage in service of the team’s goals.
In their best-selling book, First, Break All the Rules (Simon & Schuster, 1999), Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman make the point that it is far more effective to focus on each individual’s strengths and to cultivate his or her talents than to make an attempt to remediate his or her weaknesses. The authors encourage all managers to “help each person become more and more of who he already is.”
The authors suggest that many managers are more comfortable with assumptions and generalizations about types of people, such as “ego-driven salespeople” or “shy accountants,” rather than dealing with the reality that each person is different.
THE BOTTOM LINE
GOOD WORKS
Companies can use team building not only to reach their corporate goals but also to promote global citizenship.
Dell’s Global Community Involvement Week encouraged employees around the world to contribute time, energy, and enthusiasm to help the global community. In the United States, 52 teams represented 2,500 employees and Dell teams in 16 countries spearheaded community service efforts during a designated seven-day period. Thousands of Dell team members engaged in community service activities ranging from educational fairs to building houses.
Dell has numerous other team-building programs. The Team Building Match Grant Program, for example, encourages departmental and team building by providing a financial match to a not-for-profit organization chosen as a beneficiary by a Dell employee team.
SOURCE: Dell, Inc., www.dell.com.
Find the Difference
Make the extra effort to develop a thorough understanding of the capabilities of your team members. Then use that insight to put people in the right team roles.
Do you have someone on your team who is organized and detail-oriented—perhaps someone with project management experience? This person could be well suited to be the team’s administrator. An administrator helps coordinate individual team members’ efforts, keeps work on schedule, tracks the status of tasks, minds the details, and so on.
The BIG Picture
THE INTANGIBLE IMPACT OF TEAMS
An us-versus-them mentality pervades in many workplaces. Sometimes this division between employees and their managers is reinforced by company policy and traditions, and sometimes it exists as a subtle undercurrent. It is anathema