Can Your Team Deliver? [Leadership]

Steel workers do it, can you? No, you don’t have to reheat steel or roll it or whatever it is that steel mill workers actually do.
But…

Can you work with your co-workers, fellow committee members, or family members to tackle complex tasks that you know a lot about?

Can you give each other meaningful incentives for coming up with workable solutions together?

Can you be sure that the solutions you come up with will be implemented?

These are the three criteria to successful teamwork isolated by a new research study using data from steel minimills, published in the Journal of Labor Economics. It shows that there is measurable payoff when companies invest time in supporting employees to work together on complex problem-solving.

We all know though, that simply putting a group of people in a room to solve a problem is not always effective. We have all been in frustrating, ineffective meetings that create more problems than they solve. Think about a team you are on now (your volunteer committee, your professional colleagues, your family) and ask yourself:

Can we be open about expressing our opinion?
Are our meetings compelling and productive?
Do we get bogged down and are decisions hard to come by?
Can we give each other difficult feedback about poor performance?
Can we rise above our self-interest and act on behalf of the group?

If you answered no to even one of these questions, then you should look at a powerful model for creating the conditions that support effective teamwork developed by Patrick Lencioni. In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team he outlines 5 conditions which must be present to ensure effective results. The first and most basic is trust.

How do you build trust?

>Do things together: shared experiences build trust.
>Follow-through on your commitments to each other over and over again.
>Learn about and welcome what you each contribute.
>Allow yourself to be vulnerable—for real; fake shows of vulnerability are transparent to all.
>If you are the leader, don’t punish vulnerability! When someone owns up to a weakness, respect them for it.