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Humanocracy

Blog Posts

How to make sure teams work effectively with each other

By Judy Malan on October 6, 2011

Editor's note: Team performance is critical to an organization's success, but many teams feel they're not performing as well as they should be. Poor team performance, especially among teams that work across departments or functions, tend to breed silos, competing agendas, turf wars, and indecision; high performance produces organizational coherence and focus. McKinsey & Company's Organization Practice has researched the performance and attitudes of teams, those that are successful and those that are struggling, to identify the behaviors, attitudes, and organizational principles that make for effective teams. This is the third in a series of posts, based on the findings of that research, on building better teams.

In previous posts , we've discussed the importance of having the right people on a team and getting the team to focus on tasks where they can really be effective. A final critical area is making sure that team members are working effectively together towards common goals that benefit the whole organization, and not focusing exclusively on individual agendas. When dysfunctional dynamics appear on a team, it's important to deal with them as soon as they appear, lest team performance suffers.

Here are three examples of...

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How to get teams to focus on the things only they can do

By Judy Malan on October 5, 2011

Editor's note: Team performance is critical to an organization's success, but many teams feel they're not performing as well as they should be. Poor team performance, especially among teams that work across departments or functions, tend to breed silos, competing agendas, turf wars, and indecision; high performance produces organizational coherence and focus. McKinsey & Company's Organization Practice has researched the performance and attitudes of teams, those that are successful and those that are struggling, to identify the behaviors, attitudes, and organizational principles that make for effective teams. This is the second in a series of posts, based on the findings of that research, on building better teams.

Many teams have difficulty focusing their efforts in the right places. In our research on teams of senior executives, only 38 percent said their teams focused on work that truly benefited from their top-team perspective. Only 35 percent said their top teams allocated the right amounts of time among the various topics they considered important, such as strategy and people.

What are they doing instead? Everything else. Too often, these teams of senior executives fail to set or enforce priorities and instead try to cover the waterfront. In other...

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Get the right people on the team (and the wrong ones off)

By Judy Malan on October 4, 2011

Editor's note: McKinsey & Company's Organization Practice has researched the performance and attitudes of teams, those that are successful and those that are struggling, to identify the behaviors, attitudes, and organizational principles that make for effective teams. This is the first in a series of posts, based on the findings of that research, on building better teams.

No one would dispute that teams are critical to an organization’s success. Yet many teams feel they're not performing as well as they should be. Poor team performance, especially among teams that work across departments or functions, tend to breed silos, competing agendas, turf wars, and indecision; high performance produces organizational coherence and focus.

Determining the membership of a team is frequently the most powerful lever that a leader can use to shape its performance. Many team leaders regret not employing this lever early enough or thoroughly enough. Still others neglect it entirely, assuming instead that factors such as titles, pay grades, or someone’s position on the org chart are enough to warrant team membership. Little surprise, then, that more than one-third of the executives we surveyed said their top teams did not have the right people and capabilities....

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