In the search for every competitive edge, business leaders are creatively seeking increases in team performance. Every possibility is being explored: powerful incentives, intensive individual feedback and coaching, multiple types of empowerment training, etc. Along with these productivity-enhancing strategies are vast numbers of tools, products, instruments and systems. What is lacking in almost all of these approaches is an in-depth understanding of team research that identifies critical success and failure factors. Not folklore beliefs or commonly held assumptions, but hard facts based on scientific studies in team effectiveness. From an extensive review of research on teams, Batrus Hollweg has identified 3 cornerstones with each cornerstone having 2 underlying characteristics that separate failures from successes in team performance.
A LACK OF TALENT – Team members lack the Abilities and Knowledge necessary to successfully perform their jobs or function as team members.
- ABILITIES DEFICIT
"None of us is as smart as all of us." -Ken Blanchard
Each team must have collectively all the aptitudes necessary to achieve the team vision. Blanchard's "all of us" in a team setting is limited to the existing team members and, consequently, a lack of any of the critical abilities may doom the team to failure. Ability here refers to the basic characteristics developed early in life that are very difficult to change. Batrus Hollweg has identified 4 categories of basic abilities:
• Cognitive talent, (verbal, quantitative, abstract, etc.)
• Social intelligence (E.Q.)
• Emotional resilience
• Fundamental work attributes (conscientiousness,
ambition, etc.)
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