High-performance teams – Do they need leaders?

Recently I attended a training which highlighted some of the differences between team and workgroups. The discussion started with the team definition. The definition used was the one from ‘Wisdom of Teams‘ book:

A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for [...]

Joining a team as a team member

In my previous post, I discussed ways in which a leader can be effective as he/she joins a new team. In my opinion, culture plays the most important role in how easy (or difficult) it is for a newcomer to be accepted in a team, and this is more pronounced when you are a new [...]

Joining a new team as a leader

There have been many situations when I have joined a team which has lost its leader. Here are some of the things that have worked for me:

1-1s with each team member: This is extremely useful first step that I have used in many teams with good amount of success. One of the goals I have [...]

Dealing with dysfunctional teams

In my last post, I talked about how you identify a dysfunctional team you are part of. In this post, I want to discuss my experiences at dealing with one such team, and my efforts at changing the team being a member of the team. I had to resort to reading many books and my [...]

Are you part of a dysfunctional team?

In the last post, I discussed the characteristics of a dysfunctional team, based on what the book talks about as well as based on my own experiences. In this post, I will present some of the lessons learned for me about how to identify the fact that you are part of a dysfunctional team. These [...]

Characteristics of dysfunctional teams

In my last post about characteristics of high-performance teams, I discussed the tenets of high-performance teams (as given by The Wisdom of Teams). In this post, I want to discuss the characteristics of a dysfunctional team, as defined by The five dysfunctions of a team, a fable about a dysfunctional leadership team, and compare and [...]

Characteristics of High-performance Teams

In this post, I would like to discuss about characteristics of high-performance teams as defined in The Wisdom of Teams. For more detailed review of the book that I wrote sometime back, see here: Part-I, Part-II and Part-III.
The book defines a team as follows (my formatting)
A small number of people with complementary skills who are [...]

Series on High-performance and Dysfunctional Teams

I have planned a series of posts on teams. I planned this because of two reasons:

I have left the company I was in for 5 ½ years and where I learned so much about teams, and had opportunity to work in great teams as well as rank bad teams, but all of these providing huge [...]

Trust in Manager-employee relationship

In a previous post Do you think your manager is fair to you?, I proposed that trust is the most important part of the manager-employee relationship and it determines whether manager is considered fair or not by his/her employees. So the question is: how do you create trust in such a relationship? This is pertinent [...]