Leading Your Team Flashcards
Subjects of leading your team
Setting up your team for success; model of team effectiveness; key challenges to teams
How do you set up your team for success?
Understanding what characterizes well-functioning teams; understanding that the teams work best when they’re well suited for the situation; and understanding the common functions of teams
What characterizes well working teams?
Commitment to an engaging, common purpose; active and fair participation from all members; healthy and productive debate; openness to share different ideas, perspectives, and to take risks without fear of judgment; set of shared norms that govern how the team operates, specifically about information sharing and decision making
What are common team functions?
Exchanging ideas, perspectives, and best practices; ideating and innovating potential new approaches, applications, or options; implementing solutions or team recommendations; executing a multi-faceted plan
What is the model of team effectiveness?
The dashboard of effectiveness, which consists of three indicators: performance or results, team strength and flexibility, and individual learning.
What does team performance or results mean?
The team successfully delivers in a manner that satisfies appropriate audiences (boss, customer, etc…)
What does it mean to have team strength and flexibility?
The team gets better at what it currently does (strength) and is able to build capacity to take on new work (flexibility) also known as adaptability.
What does it mean for a team to excel at individual learning?
Individual team members learn and grow so that they can work in new ways.
How do you create high performing teams?
You can create these teams through using five levers to design and runs teams that meet all three criteria on the dashboard: team design, process, launch, culture, and effectiveness.
What are the five levers that make up the Model of Team Effectiveness?
Team culture, process, design, launch, and personal leadership style.
What is team culture?
The definite dos and don’t of how the team works together that everyone on the team knows implicitly, and how the team solves problems and addresses challenges.
What is team process?
These are the practices that you establish for how people interact to get their work done - for example, how you run meetings, how you share information, and how you lead people through plans and feedback. As you think about your own team or department’s process, you can map two dimensions of process: decision making and information flow.
What is team decision making?
The way decisions are made by the leader of the team. With a consensus-based approach, all members of the team are comfortable with the decision and feel that they can adequately support it. In a top-down approach, the decision rests with the leader.
What is team information flow?
There’s a spectrum for information flow from centrally orchestrated to distributed. In a centrally orchestrated system, the leader curates all information and pushes it out to the team; in a distributed system, it is open and free-flowing, each team members assessing who has or needs to have information they have access to.
What is team design?
These are the systems, structures, and practices you establish that enable performing units to function well. The lever of design includes three things: purpose, composition, and systems. Purpose is a compelling explanation of what your team is doing. Composition looks at hiring for team and individual purposes. Systems and structures allow the team to foster collaboration and allow the team to deliver on its purpose.
What is a team launch?
the beginning or starting point of a team, which a leader facilitates deliberately as an opportunity to discuss how the team will operate, including the team’s purpose, objectives, and norms. There are five aspects that make a successful launch: shared understanding of purpose, awareness and appreciation for the team’s resources, knowledge, and expertise, norms governing collaboration, strategy for performance, perspective on leadership
When do teams work best?
When they’re well suited to the situation. Specifically, when the task is so complex that no one person has the expertise or tie to figure it all out and get it done; when diverse views, knowledge, and functional experience are necessary to complete the task, and when those inputs build on one another in reciprocal ways to deliver insight and application; when you need buy-in from multiple sections/constituencies.
Explain leadership style as it applies to the five levers of model of team effectiveness.
Your patterns of behavior that are consistent across situations and your interactions with others.
What are the strongest predictors of team performance?
Social sensitivity and turn taking.
Social sensitivity
the ability to read the emotions of others
Turn taking
The extent to which each team member speaks
Key challenges facing teams
Conflict, diversity, dispersion, and psychological safety
How do you manage conflict in the team?
You should manage the team in such a way that people reap the benefits of the disagreements through changing, adapting, and learning from the experience.
You need to monitor the type and amount of conflict. Too little conflict can be a sign that people don’t feel safe speaking their mind and authentic views or there is not a diverse enough perspective. Too much conflict can distract a team and suggest the team has lost track of its collective mission or people see more at stake than the issue at hand. The type of conflict refers to how people disagree and what they disagree about. You want people to focus on the tasks, issues, challenges, problems, opportunities questions and decisions facing the team, not other team members or personalities on the team.
Why does diversity matter?
The team needs to be greater than the sum of its parts, which it can only do through diversity. To fill this diversity gap, ensure the four Es are filled: Enhancement, empathy, exploration, and esteem.
