Linking Teamwork to the Business Strategy
by Cris Hagen, MS

Strategic Team Building: Using “Hard” and “Soft” Tools to Improve Team and Business Performance

Do you know your MBTI personality type? Do you know your FIRO-B profile? Has your team clarified its values? Does your team know its Emotional IQ? Do you care? You should. And here’s why.

Research by the Hay group and other institutions is showing a clear correlation between leadership practices, teamwork, organizational climate, and business performance. When team building is done in the context of what it’s going to take to hit key performance targets, participants’ team building experience shifts from one of skepticism to one of relevance resulting in more sharply focused and coordinated teamwork.

Most team building efforts fail to make this important connection because of a poorly designed and/or a weakly executed team building initiative, leaving everyone with the sense that it was a waste of valuable time and money.

Strategic team building follows a systematic roadmap that starts with the formulation of a good strategy and ends in an effective execution of that strategy at all levels and across all functions in the organization. It addresses both the “hard” and the “soft” dimensions of what constitutes effective teamwork, seamlessly linking both dimensions to improve team performance. This article highlights some of the key steps that separate strategic team building from other less effective team building approaches, and focuses on one dimension of teamwork – decision making – where both the “hard” and “soft” dimensions of team building play in to making strategic team building an overall more effective approach.

Strategic Team Building Starts with Ensuring That Your Team Has a Shared Understanding of the Business Strategy

This is not as simple as it sounds. Let’s start with the question, “Who is your ‘team’?” If you are only thinking about the CEO and his or her direct reports, it is very likely that key people whose direct involvement is required for successful strategy execution are being excluded. Strategic team building necessarily involves at least two levels of management in the process.

Once the executive team has gone through the initial stages in the strategic team building process, it’s time to involve the next level or two of management. Senior management sets the tone and identifies objectives for cascading the process down so that middle management understands the need for improved performance. They learn about the senior team’s values, team strengths (yes, and some of the weaknesses, too), and are requested to partner in support of more effective teamwork to achieve business objectives. After all, it’s at the middles management level where decisions get executed and results are achieved. It’s also at this level where key leadership competencies are developed and applied to create and sustain a high performance work climate.

The next big hurdle is getting everyone on the team to have a shared understanding of what the strategy is. This requires real dialogue, not just a one-way presentation. The infusion of the current strategy into the minds of those executing day-to-day business operations requires an understanding of three main issues: 1) Why is this “shift” taking place? 2) How does it affect current priorities and work demands? And 3) What new actions or activities are required in my area to put this new strategy to work? Strategic team building requires this level of understanding in order to build the necessary commitment and focus to execute the strategy in the most effective manner possible.

Strategic Team Building Requires That Key Goals and Objectives Are Shared Across Functional Boundaries

The glue that holds a good team together is the psychological and emotional energy each member receives from working together towards a common set of clear objectives. It’s the energy that comes from being stretched to new limits in ways that provide a sense of both personal and professional fulfillment. It’s the energy that comes from making a positive contribution and seeing results. For all these reasons, successful team building initiatives must start by addressing the link between the team’s efforts and the company’s strategic plan. This link must also be reinforced by a performance management and compensation plan that provides incentives for the achievement of shared goals and objectives.

Once the team understands the business rationale for working together more effectively, a series of assessments helps the team to examine its strengths and weaknesses.

These assessments focus on intrapersonal, interpersonal, and overall team effectiveness in several key areas, including:
• Decision-making
• Setting a high performance climate
• Problem-solving
• Conflict resolution
• Integration/coordination of work
• Communication
• Leading change

Does Your Executive Team Suffer from “DIP”?

Let’s look at decision-making as an example of how business performance can be influenced by ineffective teamwork. The term, “DIP”, stands for “decisions in progress”. And like WIP (work in progress) in the manufacturing world, DIP drives up organizational costs, slows all key time-based measures of organizational performance, and drives your middle management and employee population crazy.

For the “hard” aspects of decision-making and teamwork tools can be used to map out key decision roles and responsibilities. Often, this can speed decision cycle times 20-40% or more, reducing “DIP” and the costs associated with it.

With regard to the “soft” aspects of decision-making, it’s important to examine the executive team’s shared values and priorities. Assessment tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or the FIRO-B aid in examining how such dynamics as “need for control”, “information processing preferences”, or “decision styles” influence the team decision process. By increasing awareness of these dynamics, it is often possible to improve not only decision efficiency, but effectiveness as well. [24x7]