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Strategic Team Building:
Linking Teamwork to the Business Strategy
Cris Hagen, MS
Strategic Team Building: Using “Hard” and “Soft” Tools To Improve Team and Business Performance
Do you know your MBTI personality type? Do you know your FIRO-B profile? Has your team clarified its values? Does your team know its Emotional IQ? Do you care? You should. And here’s why.
Research by the Hay group and other institutions is showing a clear correlation between leadership practices, teamwork, organizational climate, and business performance. When team building is done in the context of what it’s going to take to hit key performance targets, participants’ team building experience shifts from one of skepticism to one of relevance resulting in more sharply focused and coordinated teamwork. Most team building efforts fail to make this important connection because of a poorly designed and/or a weakly executed team building initiative, leaving everyone with the sense that it was a waste of valuable time and money.
Strategic team building follows a systematic roadmap that starts with the formulation of a good strategy and ends in an effective execution of that strategy at all levels and across all functions in the organization. It addresses both the “hard” and the “soft” dimensions of what constitutes effective teamwork, seamlessly linking both dimensions so that key individual and team-based competencies are developed along the way. This article highlights some of the key steps that separate strategic team building from other less effective team building approaches, and focuses on one dimension of teamwork – decision making – where both the “hard” and “soft” dimensions of team building play in to making strategic team building an overall more effective approach.
Strategic Team Building Starts with Ensuring That Your Team Has a Shared Understanding of the Business Strategy
This is not as simple as it sounds. Let’s start with the question, “Who is your ‘team’?” If you are only thinking about the CEO and his or her direct reports, it is very likely that key people whose direct leadership involvement is required for successful execution of the strategy are being excluded. Strategic team building necessarily involves at least two and perhaps three levels of management in the process.
When I conduct leadership development programs, one of the questions I ask participants is, “How much work in your department will not get done today because you are attending this training program?” The answer, of course, is that “most everything would get done unless there was a critical decision I had to make”. Then I ask them, “How much work in your department would not get done if your entire staff was gone from the workplace for the day?” The answer, of course, is that “practically nothing would get done”. In the same manner, team building needs to cascade down the organization so that the initiative has a real impact on day-to-day business.
Once the executive team has gone through key stages in the strategic team building initiative, it’s time to involve the next level or two of management in the process. Senior management sets the tone and identifies objectives for cascading the process down so that middle management “gets the bug” for improved performance as well. Middle management learns about the senior team’s values, team strengths (yes, and some of the weaknesses, too), and are requested to partner in support of more effective teamwork to achieve business objectives. After all, it’s at these next levels of management where decisions get executed and where results are achieved. It’s also at this level where key leadership competencies need to be developed and applied in order to create and sustain a high performance work climate.
The next big hurdle is getting everyone on the team to have a shared understanding of what the strategy is. This requires real dialogue, not just a presentation by the VP of Business Strategy who hands out copies of the presentation afterwards. The infusion of the current strategy into the minds of those executing day-to-day business operations requires an understanding of three main issues: 1) Why is this “shift” taking place? 2) How does it affect current priorities and work demands? And 3) What new actions or activities are going to be required in my division/department to put this new strategy to work? Strategic team building requires this level of understanding in order to build the necessary commitment and focus to execute the strategy in the most effective manner possible.
Strategic Team Building Requires That Key Goals and Objectives Are Shared Across Functional Boundaries
The glue that holds a good team together is the psychological and emotional energy each member receives from working together towards a common set of clear objectives. It’s the energy that comes from having one’s skills, abilities, and knowledge stretched to new limits in ways that provide a sense of both personal and professional fulfillment. It’s the energy that comes from making a positive contribution and seeing results. For all these reasons, successful team building initiatives must start by addressing the link between the team’s efforts and the company’s strategic plan. This link must also be reinforced by ensuring that the design of the performance management and compensation plans jointly incentivize the team for the achievement of shared goals and objectives.
Once the team understands the business rationale for working together more effectively, a series of assessments over time helps the team to examine its strengths and weaknesses. These assessments range in focus from “intra-personal” (self assessments of one’s own characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses) to “inter-personal” (looking at the nature and effectiveness of one’s interactions with others) and finally to the team’s overall effectiveness in key areas such as the following:
Does Your Executive Team Suffer from “DIP”?
Let’s look at decision-making as an example of how business performance can be influenced by ineffective teamwork. The term, “DIP”, stands for “decisions in progress”. And like WIP (work in progress) in the manufacturing world, DIP drives up organizational costs, slows all key time-based measures of organizational performance, and drives your middle management and employee population crazy.
From the “hard” aspects of decision-making and teamwork we will start by helping you to plot the amount of time it takes for key decisions to be made. Often, it is possible to increase the efficiency of decision-making by establishing clearer guidelines around decision roles and responsibilities. By mapping out these roles for key decisions required to run the business, it is possible to reduce the levels of management involvement thus driving decision-making to the point in the organization where the information required to make the decision resides. This can speed decision cycle times 20-40% or more, reducing “DIP” and the costs associated with it.
With regard to the “soft” aspects of decision-making, we help your team examine such things as the executive team’s trust levels among themselves and with the next 1-2 layers management beneath them. We may also examine whether members of the executive team share the same values and priorities, or whether they lack confidence in their awareness of which values should govern any given decision. Finally, we may use assessment tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or the FIRO-B to examine how such dynamics as “need for control”, “information processing preferences”, or “decision styles” influence the team decision process. By increasing individual and team awareness of these dynamics, it is often possible to improve not only decision efficiency, but effectiveness as well. Assessment tools like the MBTI and the FIRO-B can not only shed light on how intra-personal and inter-personal dynamics influence the decision process, but can lead teams to establish better ground rules for decisions, to define values against which decisions can be weighed, and to learn more effective ways of presenting and processing information to facilitate a more efficient decision making process.
Strategic team building employs the right tools and approach depending on the overall needs of your team. Cris Hagen and Associates will work with your team to tailor an approach based on an assessment of those needs.
Strategic Team Building: Is It Right for You and Your Team?
To find out more about our Strategic Team Building approach and determine if it is right for your and your team, we urge you to contact us. Our initial consultation with you carries no charge or obligation. We will discuss your objectives and help you to determine if this approach is suited to your needs. Contact us at crishagen@crishagen.com for more information.