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The Wisdom Of Team Summary

Decent Essays

The Wisdom of Teams book defines the word team as ‘A small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.’ (Katzenbach & Smith 1st September 2005). This quote clearly explains the term and identifies which aspects are the most important in becoming a high performance team. This book provides detailed understanding into distinguishing the differences between groups, teams and high performance teams. Furthermore, it explains how key concepts such as goals, purpose and approach are crucial in creating a successful organisational team. This along with a focus on collective work output therefore working towards the same targets …show more content…

This text explains the difference between an effective and an ineffective team and which factors influence this as mentioned above by the main elements of a team. 'No major company we know is pursuing an energized, productive workforce without the conscious use of teams.'(Katzenbach & Smith 1st September 2005 Page 252) This quote highlights the importance of teams in a organisations success, this can be seen by looking at companies such as Google which put a lot of focus into there teams, as can clearly be seen by looking at there companies philosophy online where it states “There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success.” These two quotes correlate highly in showing the …show more content…

This includes what actions are involved in order to become a high performance team and also the challenges that may occur in doing so. The ‘Team Performance Curve’ is a key theory outlined within this text, it shares similar ideas to “Tuckmans Theory” however it has the added idea of ‘performance impact’. Tuckmans forming storming and norming in groups is another key text needed in order to further my understanding of learning in teams. The team performance curve outlines the five main different types of teams and ranks them on both ‘performance impact’ and ‘team effectiveness’. At Team Kaizen we currently are what is described as a ‘Working Group’ this is because each team member is only accountable for the work the team has delegated them. This can be seen through the failure of our first project as a team where everyone didn’t take responsibility for it not being a success, this may have been due to the lack of leadership on the venture, something which for our next venture as a group “Boozey Bunnies” the same mistakes will not occur. A high performance team is defined as ‘a group that meets all the conditions of real teams, and has members who are also deeply committed to each other's personal growth and success. That commitment usually transcends the team. The high performance team significantly outperforms all other like teams, and outperforms all reasonable expectations given its membership.

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