Key Conditions for Successful Teams and High-Performing Empowered Teams. Turn strategy and goals into tangible actions and results.

June 30, 2009 by kutenk · 1 Comment
Filed under: Team Building and Management 

Successful Teams Add Value

Successful teams effectively turn strategy and goals into tangible actions and results. They make decisions more rapidly and create support for their decisions in the wider organization. They adapt faster to changing market conditions or to changes in their organization. This obviously leads to better results.

There seems to be consensus about some key conditions that make a team successful:

    Clear, engaging and meaningful direction. Challenging goals that are relevant for the organization motivate teams. The clarity needed for successful teamwork implies that there is a clear orientation and empowerment given to the members of the team for what they are supposed to do. In order to achieve such clear, challenging goals, all the available talent has to be engaged.

    Empowered team structure. A real team is bounded and stable over time. The team members need to work interdependently to reach their common goal.  They are empowered to manage their own teamwork and their internal processes. They develop their own norms of conduct (‘What must always be done and what must never be done’). There is support from the wider organization that the team works in.




    The right team composition. The ideal size for a team is six to seven people. Often, teams are too big. The team members need to have integrity with regard to the team. Individual team members need to have the right skills and competencies. Regarding the latter in particular, the competencies connected with emotional intelligence (self-awareness, integrity, empathy, influencing others, etc) are of great importance.

Beside the factors mentioned above, it is important that there is support from the wider organization. This support is twofold. First there is the moral dimension. Without visible support, especially from the leadership team, it will be difficult for a team to perform successfully. The team must be empowered to make its own decisions, within an agreed framework and mandate for the team.




The second aspect of organizational support is material support. This includes the availability of appropriate information systems, a stimulating physical working environment, but also a fair assessment of the performance of individual team members and the team as a whole, coupled with a fair reward based on that assessment. We also want to stress the importance of the availability of training to accelerate the building of teams and to provide guidance for developing teams into high-performing teams. This is an area for capturing the learning from successful teams, identifying what works best in the organization and making this learning effectively available to others in the organization by designing, organizing and executing relevant training programmes.

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