Removing the Barriers to Team Success

 

Sherriton and Stern in their book 'Corporate Culture: Removing the Hidden Barriers to Team Success'.  contest that corporate culture change is needed for successful implementation of formal teams.  

However we ought to bear in mind the following:

1. Senior managers trying to implement teams continue to act individually: they are concerned about control over the teams and concerned that consensus decision making is too time consuming. They often set a very bad example, for example, by protecting their turf.
2. Team members are typically not used to working in teams. They often are uncomfortable and lack the communication skills to make the teams work effectively.
3. Introduction of teams while downsizing or facing threats of downsizing creates forces that are antithetical to teams.
1. Corporate culture is defined by four elements.
1. Ritualized patterns of beliefs, values and behaviors.
2. Management environment created by management styles, philosophies, what is said, done and rewarded.
3. Management environment created by systems and procedures.
4. Written and unwritten norms and procedures.
2. Their book describes successful change in subcultures when top-level support was either absent or sporadic.
1. They feel that each major functional organization such as marketing or R&D has its own subculture, as do divisions and other large units of the organization.
2. Subcultures are influenced by the overall corporate culture, but subcultures are never the same as the overall culture.
3. There is much more freedom to change a subculture than is commonly realized or acted upon

Insights from 'Corporate Culture: Removing the Hidden Barriers to Team Success'. By Jacalyn Sherriton and James Stern.

Gaining emotional commitment for Peak Performance

Peak Performance By Jon Katzenbach How do companies get the emotional commitment from employees which leads to peak performance?  This is the key question that Jon Katzenbach's  book deals with.  Almost all organizations selected were successful for at least a 10 year period based on enterprise performance criteria, such as shareholder return, customer satisfaction and quality. Many such as Marriott, Southwest Airlines, 3M, and Home Depot show up on a number of authors' lists as great companies. Just as the other authors in this set do, Katzenbach goes to lengths to determine which companies are successful using standard financial criteria before examining why their approaches to people are so successful.  The research team did not find one path to employee commitment but five paths. They are described in the diagram below. Katzenbach research determined that having only one path to emotional commitment was not usually sustainable. Multiple paths are a better way to go. He also found that some organizations need to shift their path over time as growth or other changes make the original path ineffective...