Volume 18, Number 1 Article by Babu Subramanian March, 2006
Building Smart Teams: A Roadmap to High Performance : By Carol A Beatty and Brenda A Barker Scott, Response Books, New Delhi, pp. 197, Price: Rs. 295. :
Based on comprehensive data on more than 80 academic and 185 industry teams covering more than 350 individuals in MBA learning teams and close to 1,500 members of work teams in both public and private sectors, this book by Carol Beatty and Brenda Barker Scott of Queen’s University, Canada comes up with a useful Team Effectiveness model. The model comprises three critical skill sets – team management practices, problem solving skills and conflict handling skills, leading to team performance and team satisfaction.
According to Goleman, Kaufman and Ray, the ability to acquire, interpret, and act upon information innovatively in process and products is a core competitive capability. This, the authors believe, requires smart teams. Drawing from Peter DeLisle’s typology of task and relationship complexity, the authors make a distinction between déjà vu challenges and jamais vu challenges. While the former kind is relatively easy to deal with as the team would have learnt how to handle them, the latter presents challenges that one has not encountered before. The authors hold that well-designed teams can provide the task and relationship ingenuity to survive and thrive in jamais vu territory. Can such teams be designed? Katzenbach and Smith in Wisdom of Teams say that high-performance teams that can take challenges are extremely rare because a high degree of personal commitment to one another is needed to build them. Such a commitment cannot be managed, although it can be exploited and emulated. The book under review must be approached from this perspective.
Organisations make it difficult for teamwork to develop, partly because ‘teamwork is not overtly recognized and rewarded within organizations. While teamwork may be an espoused value, the rewards go to individuals and not team contributors.’ However the model presented in this book is too narrow to address the roots of this vital issue. On the other hand, pseudo teams (the non productive phenomenon created solely for the sake of having teams) has soured the enthusiasm for teamwork in organisations. The authors also point out the fact of the time taken for team building – time which team members complain they don’t have. The authors are convinced from their research that the time spent creating team management practices is well worth the investment. However, they do not address the problem of time taken up by a surfeit of meetings for handling day to day issues.
The book offers a number of useful tools. Marvin Weisbord’s Trends Mind Map exercise helps the team brainstorm the trends and events that give rise to the team problem or challenge. This can lead to defining the team’s purpose. With Trends Mind Map, the driving forces behind the team’s purpose can be identified, as well as the team’s relationship with other groups and processes.
Ironically team agreement can be counterproductive. One of the best parts of the book is the treatment of the group’s inability to manage agreement, which can give rise to wrong decisions. The authors quote Jerry Harvey who coined the term ‘Abilene Paradox’ to describe a disastrous family trip to Abilene in Texas. They also refer to the Asch experiments devised by social psychologist Solomon Asch, which help us understand how we resist or yield to group pressures, and Groupthink, a term coined by Irving Janis. Janis analysed the disastrous decision-making dynamics of J F Kennedy’s advisors that led to the Bay of Pigs invasion to find that groupthink occurs when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive in-group that it tends to override the realistic appraisal of alternate courses of action. Other tools of interest mentioned in the book are Roger Von Oech’s Mental Locks, which sensitise us to how our thinking is locked in the same old vertical way, Chris Moore’s circle of conflict, Kurt Lewin’s ‘Building Support for Beef Hearts, Sweetbreads, and Kidneys’ and Dannemiller’s D*V*F> R. There are also exercises described in the book such as Blind Trust Walk, Grid Maze and Win All You Can.
Some of the well known tools don’t find a mention in the book. Creative Problem solving is a useful tool introduced by Alex Orborn and Sid Parnes. Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono is another well known tool that doesn’t find a mention. Yet another useful tool that can help in resolving conflicts and improving understanding among team members is MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator), developed by the mother and daughter team of Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. Wisdom of Teams, one of the most important books on team work, is not mentioned at all, although another book by Katzenbach, Teams at the Top: Unleashing the Potential of Both Teams and Individual Leaders, is listed under references.
Those who are passionate about teams will like to take a look at Building Smart Teams… to get to know some of the new tools, although they may find the book’s Team Effectiveness Model rather truncated as it does not address some of the vital issues concerning team work.
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