Do you manage your teams the way you should?

[Previously posted by Keith Murray on Google's BlogSpot, August 6, 2009] 

None of us who've spent much time in school have a difficult time conjuring up memories of failed "team" experiences--times when people we were cast together with to collectively "do an assignment" or achieve a project outcome of one sort or another, and the experience was, at best, a disappointing one; it might actually have been a very annoying event, one we'd not like to duplicate again if it could be avoided!   

Then as students we get to the grown-up world of business, where teamwork is the order of the day: cross-disciplinary teams, interdepartmental teams, project teams, and the list goes on. And it is with apprehension that comes from failed team experiences in the past that we almost always embark on a new team undertaking. 

We know that the research shows that teams are frequently the best alternative--they get better ideas and solutions, they are better and faster at solving problems, they provide more comprehensive findings, etc. But somehow we have a hard time to bring ourselves to be enthusiastic as what they can do for us professionally or personally. We seem to have an apparent belief that they are good for everyone else but us, in every other context except our own!

If you're one of those kind of people, help is on the way! Enter the Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard University, J. Richard Hackman. In the May 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Diane Coutu interviews Dr. Hackman and you can read about in "Why Teams DON'T Work." He--in a perverse, reassuring way--starts by stating what we all know: "I have no question that a team can generate magic. But don't count on it."

Most of the people who read this are, in their work-a-day world, managers, managers who either use teams a lot [frequently with mixed results], or managers who don't use teams as much as they should. Hackman proposes that how one builds a team include the following pointers:  Teams

[1] Must be real;

[2] Need a compelling direction;

[3] Need enabling structures;

[4] Need a supportive organization; and

[5] Need expert coaching.

I recommend you check out the interview in HBR and see for yourself--if you're, team-wise, doing it right or what you might do to improve on what your already doing pretty well!