High-performance team-building in the future of work
Creating a supportive environment
cultural conditions (such as senior leadership endorsement, or shelter from a risk-averse organizational culture for a team charged with innovation) that align with their purpose. The specifics of a supportive environment will be dictated by the team’s purpose. For a project-based team within a large organization, for instance, a supportive environment might include appropriate funding, freedom to act (within political constraints), and colocation of team members or sufficient tools to enable virtual collaboration. It is particularly important that the team’s environment be compatible with its purpose, direction, and practices (factors that we will shortly explore). For example, some teams must navigate the tension between improving value for customers while also cutting costs. Similarly, a team focused on innovation must navigate the tension between prescriptive processes and creating new practices. A cross-functional team will also struggle if the performance metrics of team members are aligned to their home function and misaligned with the team’s objective. ELEMENTS OF A SUPPORTIVE ENVIRONMENT CAN INCLUDE: • Tools (typically technology and platforms) available to the team • Resources (money, though also nonmonetary resources) • Information (typically data) • Imposed structures (performance schemas are a good example) • Intergroup cooperation (such as limiting or eliminating “transaction” costs) • Organizational culture aligned to the teams • An appropriate level of autonomy • Favorable conditions (including economic conditions)
A team in a cycling peloton relies on more than the athletes actually cycling. It includes others, such as mechanics and even the soigneurs, 17 who are there to support the cyclists. Many of these support personnel follow the cyclists on the racecourse to ensure that support is available when it is most needed. The team and, in particular, the team member who crosses the finish line first, cannot succeed unless all these moving parts work in concert, including domestiques creating slipstreams and conserving the energy of select riders, mechanics following along behind the peloton to fix broken equipment just in time, and the directeurs sportifs strategizing each stage of the race. All this is to highlight that a team in a cycling peloton cannot succeed unless it has a supportive environment . The environment is the workplace where the team operates, the social and physical context of the work, and the ecosystem that the team is part of. Creating a supportive environment is one of the team manager’s most important responsibilities, and is the first task they should focus on. The same is true in business. While it might be tempting to first focus on factors within the team as determinants of its effectiveness, the environment that a team operates within is key to its success and cannot be ignored. The environment is the team’s foundation, and shoddy foundations will result in a poorly performing team. Creating a supportive environment can be a major challenge for a team that cuts across organizational boundaries. The disconnect between cross- functional and cross-organizational teams and current organizational models—the “outside the org chart” nature of these teams—creates resourcing and governance challenges. Such teams, therefore, need to pay particular attention to ensuring that they have the tools, information, and
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