8601-201 Improving Performance of the Work Team

Improving Performance of the Work Team aims to help you become aware of the organization’s goals and the means of motivating team members to achieve them.

You will need to prepare materials (such as handouts and OHP (Power-point) slides) to outline what the organization expects your team to do to achieve their performance targets. Additionally, you will need to show how individual team members contribute to team objectives and propose ways to improve underperformance. Finally, within the context of a motivational theory, you can justify how you encourage team members to achieve their objectives through these improvement activities.

Essential management skill is the ability to work with people so that the right things happen. When individuals come together to work in a group or a team, managers have to manage people effectively, which requires leading, organizing, facilitating group and teamwork, and managing conflict.

The purpose of this post is to provide an overview of teamwork from beginning to end. Team creation includes deciding if creating a group or team is the best approach (this is not always true! ), selecting individuals to work in it, setting up team-working processes, supporting teams through various development stages, reviewing progress, and evaluating team outputs. Your primary activity involves analyzing a current situation with a team or group that you manage or are familiar with to develop solutions.

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Learning outcomes

Understand the organization’s expectations concerning team performance

• Explain the organization’s expectations of the team per the company’s policies
• The objectives of the team in achieving the organizational targets
• Describe how the performance of individual team members affects the team’s overall performance

Understand how underperformance can be addressed

• Assess your team’s performance concerning the indicators of underperformance
• Identify the possible causes of underperformance.
• List the actions that could be taken to rectify underperformance

Understanding the role motivation plays in improving performance

• Describe a widely accepted theory of motivation
• Explain how actions can be taken to motivate one’s team and improve performance using a theory of motivation

Unit purpose and aim(s)

• To develop an understanding of the organizational goals of the team and how team members should be motivated to accomplish these goals.

Types of teams

By working together, companies and individuals can improve both their performance and productivity. Teams, however, are not formed to achieve the same goals or are charged with the same responsibilities. Neither are they organized in the same way. There are some managers, for instance, who have more autonomy than others and are less accountable to those in charge.

The team leader is responsible for setting the team’s goals and ensuring the team’s activities are carried out effectively. However, some are more or less self-governing. Though a leader sets up overall goals and strategies, the team itself chooses and manages its methods to achieve its goals and implement its strategies.

Manager-Led Teams

A manager-led team is one in which the manager is the team leader and is tasked with setting and monitoring goals, assigning tasks, and monitoring the team’s performance. It is not uncommon for team members to have little or no autonomy. For example, the key employees of a professional football team (a manager-led team) are trained (and highly paid) athletes, but a head coach tightly controls their activities on the field. Ultimately, as the manager of the team, the coach is responsible for both devising the strategies by which the team will achieve its goal of winning games and determining the result of the games and season.

Self-Managing Teams

Teams that manage themselves (also known as self-directed teams) have significant autonomy. In most cases, it is a small company that absorbs activities that traditional supervisors once managed. While a manager or team leader may set the overall goals, the self-managing team members determine what activities need to be undertaken to achieve them.

Cross-Functional Teams

Many companies utilize cross-functional teams, which, as their name implies, cut across an organization’s various functional areas (operations, marketing, finance, etc.). A cross-functional team combines the expertise of members from different functional areas to solve problems.

Factors in effective teamwork

The first step to effective teamwork is to identify several factors that contribute to it. When these factors are met, teams perform most effectively:

• Members communicate effectively.
• The members depend on each other. Team productivity and efficiency are higher when members depend on each other to complete tasks.
• The members trust one another.
• The members work better together than individually. Collective performance exceeds individual performance when team members perform better together than separately.
• As members, they become boosters. The collective results improve when members of the team encourage one another to do their best.
• Team members enjoy being part of the team.
• The leadership rotates.

It may seem intuitive to consider some of these factors. However, as such issues are rarely clearly defined, we should examine the issue of group effectiveness from another perspective – one that considers the effects of factors that aren’t relatively straightforward.

Wrap Up

This programme is designed for existing or aspiring team leaders and will provide them with a solid foundation in their formal development as team leaders. Feel free to contact us if you need help with your ILM assignment.

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