2.1 Overview

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

Building High-Performing Teams

51 ratings

University of Pennsylvania

Building High-Performing Teams

51 ratings

Course 2 of 5 in the Specialization Culture-Driven Team Building

Teams are essential to the modern organization, but most never reach their potential. Co-workers miscommunicate, and groups struggle to adapt to changes in the market or their organizations. When teams lack self-awareness about these challenges, performance suffers. Based on years of team culture research and consulting experience, this course helps you understand the problems that hurt productivity, and gives you tools for creating positive change. This course also guides you through creating the ground rules and structure needed to set your team up for success. You gain the skills to diagnose issues such as conflicts, groupthink and lack of commitment in your team before they get out of control. The course offers frameworks to adjust team behaviors and get the best performance out of your people. You also understand frequent stumbling blocks for common team types, such as startups and virtual teams, and learn solutions tailored to each one.

From the lesson

Diagnosing Team Problems

In this module, we’ll look at why good teams go bad. We’ll focus on those process losses I mentioned, and dig into the different problems that can derail your group from its goals. Since it can be hard to really pinpoint team problems and even harder to talk about them, we’ll look at some methods that will help you do both.

2.1 Overview3:54

2.2 The Sources of Team Misalignments5:48

2.3 Environmental Misalignments5:00

2.4 Individual Misalignments4:42

2.5 Assignment - GM Case4:21

2.6 Team Culture Types4:39

2.7 Misalignments Checklist3:42

2.8 Taking the Team Temperature3:57

2.9 Interview: Dr. Jack Gutsche16:57

Meet the Instructors

Derek Newberry, Ph.D.
Lecturer
Organizational Dynamics
Dr. Aviva Legatt
Affiliated Faculty
Organizational Dynamics

I was once working with the leadership team, of a construction company,

to develop a new corporate strategy.

The company had grown quickly, but saw their profits shrink as a result.

And all of the sudden they found themselves in a difficult

financial situation.

I and my colleague organized a retreat for them to come up with a plan for

growing profits again.

The top executives of this team were all talented and had deep experience.

That's why I was surprised when they seemed to have a tough time getting a good

conversation going.

The company's CEO had even started off the day by telling them, we need your help.

We need to think creatively, so there are no dumb ideas.

Let's just get everything out on the table.

So after a slow start, we were finally able to generate some dialog.

More and more of the executives chimed in,

they talked about what they were hearing in the field and

they started coming up with insights about the company's strategy.

I wondered why it had taken so

long for these bright leaders to start engaging each other.

Then, in the middle of the discussion, the CEO who had been pretty quiet up to that

point, started banging his hand on the table, and yelled, folks, we're in

a serious situation, and all I hear is a bunch of dumb ideas that won't work.

The room fell silent.

And all the sudden the problem became clear.

The CEO who had told them to open up at the beginning of the day,

turn out to be the type of boss who would shut people down

when he didn't like what they had to say.

Fortunately, the CEO missed the most of the following discussions for

other meetings.

It was a good thing because as soon as he left,

the dialogue became a lot more free flowing.

The executives created the foundation for a solid strategic growth plan and

when the CEO came back at the end of the day, he was happy with the results.

He seem to have absolutely no idea the effect his attitude having on his

teams ability to speak up and think critically.

The point here is not that the CEO was a bad leader.

On the contrary,

he had been really fundamental to the company's success before this crisis.

But, good leaders make mistakes, and even the best performing teams get misaligned.

They can lose commitment, and their performance can suffer for

reasons that they may not even notice.

Just as the CEO was blind to the ways he was bringing the room down.

So what can you do about this on your team?

In the last module, we talked about the foundations of high performing teams.

We went over how to create the right rules, the right goals, roles, and

norms, to gain commitment from a group, and

to put them in position to get better results.

In this module, we'll look at why teams still eventually get off track and

stop following their original roles.

You'll learn how to be a good observer of your own team and

to notice these issues as they arise so

you can fix them before they really hurt your group's chemistry and drive.

First, we'll talk about why some of the biggest team problems,

the real elephants in the room, can actually be invisible to us.

It has to do with the way group culture becomes ingrained in everything we do.

This has its benefits, but, as we'll see,

it can also lead to bad habits that are hard to change.

We'll then talk about the specific ways in which groups get misaligned, both with

each other and with their environment, such as their larger organization,

the market, or their customers and stakeholders.

Next, we'll talk about tools and strategies you can use for bringing these

misalignments to the surface and understanding them in very specific terms.

Since it can be difficult to understand and diagnose a team's bad habits, this

module is really oriented toward helping you develop more self awareness and

situational awareness.

You'll get better at reflecting on your team dynamic and

testing your assumptions about what the problems might be.

To help you build this skill, we'll look at cases of team misalignments, so

you can get some practice with the perspective and tools we'll be using.

So, let's dive in.

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