By Anne Evenson
Organizational and individual success relies on the performance of teams. Read on to learn the types of teams and their obstacles, as well as some real-world examples.
“Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”
Vince Lombardi, American football coach
In part one of this blog series, we discussed the characteristics of high-performance teams, why they are essential to organizational and individual success, how they differ from regular work teams and their development stages. In part two, we’ll review the various types of work teams and some common obstacles high-performance teams face. We’ll also look at real-world examples of high-performing teams.
Standard Types of High-Performance Teams
Work Teams
Work teams are permanent units that produce goods or provide services and consist of full-time employees with well-defined roles and responsibilities in stable, long-lasting positions. Supervisors traditionally manage work teams, make most decisions involving functions, tasks, and objectives, and delegate accordingly.
Project Teams
Project teams are usually temporary, focusing on producing a single output like a new service, product launch or advertising campaign. Reaching project objectives involves considerable expertise, and members must have various backgrounds, skills and experience.
Parallel Teams
Organizations form parallel teams by uniting people from separate work units to perform a specific function outside the organization’s usual purview. Parallel teams exist alongside the formal organizational structure, and membership is constant throughout the project cycle until they realize their goal, usually developing recommendations on a process or system. They have limited authority and are typically short-lived. Parallel teams focus primarily on problem-solving and improvement-oriented tasks like quality or production improvement, employee engagement or task forces.
Management Teams
Management teams coordinate and direct organizational operations to ensure the organization achieves its goals. These teams are typically hierarchical, with executive management at the organization’s top. The executive management team develops and implements the organizational strategic direction by applying its collective expertise to set goals, allocate resources, monitor performance, make critical decisions, ensure compliance and establish stakeholder relationships.
Virtual Teams
Virtual teams are digitally connected groups working together to pursue shared goals across time, space and organizational boundaries. Members coordinate and collaborate primarily via digital technology to achieve specific organizational objectives and sometimes never meet in real life. Virtual teams allow organizations to acquire top talent for particular projects without geographical restrictions and are often considered more efficient and cost-effective.
Common Obstacles Faced by High-Performance Teams
Just as it’s critical to understand the defining characteristics of a high-performance team, it’s equally essential to be aware of some common pitfalls these types of teams face. The following hallmarks are strong indicators of a team not functioning at an optimal level:
- Bad Leadership: Leaders who don’t guide their team by offering insight and encouraging collaboration make team members feel disconnected and unmotivated, ultimately affecting their ability to work together. Ineffective leaders erect barriers to professional development, fail to offer teamwork opportunities and don’t incentivize successful collaboration.
- Poor Communication: Low-performing teams have irregular or nonexistent communication among members, causing a lack of clarity regarding expectations and responsibilities. Poor team communication also creates a situation where colleagues don’t listen to one another and don’t feel connected or comfortable presenting their perspectives and conveying expectations.
- Rampant Mistrust: Without a strong foundation of trust, colleagues may feel uncomfortable offering constructive criticism and sharing ideas and perspectives, resulting in miscommunication, conflict, and loss of confidence in each other’s abilities.
- Inadequate Conflict Management: While disagreements among members are unavoidable, the inability to resolve disputes quickly leads to loss of productivity and poor performance. Teams that don’t address conflict openly and transparently allow grudges to fester, destroying morale.
- Vague Goals: Without goal clarity, members may face challenges if they don’t agree with or understand their work objectives. Not having a standard protocol that analyzes and defines goals can trigger a drop in commitment and engagement.
- Workflow Mismanagement: Even with clearly defined goals, some teams struggle to understand the tasks they must complete to reach them. Members don’t understand their role in achieving the shared goal without consistent workflow management.
- Ill-defined Roles and Responsibilities: Conflicts will happen when members are unclear about their roles and responsibilities, ultimately impeding the team’s overall performance.
- Accountability Issues: When some team members regularly underperform and don’t take responsibility for how their actions affect the team’s progress, this can cause resentment and distrust.
Examples of High-Performance Teams
NASA Apollo 11 Moon Landing
One of the most historic high-performance teams is the Apollo 11 1969 moon landing team. Most people know who Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins are, but many aren’t aware that approximately 400,000 mission planners were involved in two grueling years of launch prep.
Teams of scientists, engineers and technicians (many of whom had never worked in aerospace) worked diligently to design a machine capable of safely transporting humans into space. Their work was incredibly complex. The team had to understand the moon’s surface geography while factoring in craters, boulders and cliffs to pinpoint the best place for Apollo 11 to land. They also had to consider the best time to land due to the sun’s position.
Understanding that the key to team cohesion is human connection, the astronauts regularly visited the NASA labs to meet the people behind the mission. Numerous technicians and engineers in the operations control room guided and supported the men flying into outer space. Communication was essential in every step of this process and enabled this high-performance team to achieve one of the most significant milestones in our recent history.
The Black Panther Movie
In 2019, Kyle Buchanan interviewed Ryan Coogler, the director of Black Panther, for the New York Times. Part of their discussion focused on the team of high-performing professionals Coogler assembled to create the Marvel blockbuster film. “I work in an art form where I have a lot of help,” Coogler said. “I’ve got hundreds of people helping bring this film to life, and a lot of people on the street don’t know that.”
Coogler acknowledged hiring department heads who excelled in their fields. “In each one of the circumstances where I’ve worked with these incredible filmmakers that happen to be women, they were the best people for the job,” he said. “If you aren’t opening up to find people who are truly the best, then that can limit you.” Many of these high performers strived to succeed in their fields, and when Coogler offered them this prestigious opportunity, they showed appreciation by working even harder for him. Coogler regularly sought his team’s advice and input and was always willing to listen to different perspectives. Ryan Coogler’s exceptional leadership helped him create a film that grossed well over a billion dollars, demonstrating that a black-led movie could be wildly successful worldwide.
Stay tuned for part three of this blog series, where we’ll offer specific guidance on cultivating and sustaining a high-performance team using the four-phase team development model.
Anne Evenson is a native Austinite and a proud Veteran’s spouse with over 20 years of marketing, communications and program coordination experience in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. She is also a sculptor, jeweler and all-around dabbler in the arts and loves to help military-connected individuals discover their inner creativity.
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