A manager is someone to whom others report. Those others might be a group of individuals all working on their own tasks, or they might be a team working collaboratively toward a goal. Most managers also are members of teams that report to a higher level boss. I'm betting you are too. You have to be adept at managing individuals and teams that report to you, co-leading teams on which you're a member, and leading upward to a boss. Throughout the course, we'll learn about all of these needed skills. In these next few videos, we'll focus on how you as both a team lead and a team member, can set the conditions and manage the process for team success. Have you ever been on or lead a team that started off with great energy and enthusiasm, and then as time went by lost its way? As the leader and even as a team member you do everything you can to keep your team on track. Yet individuals get pulled into other projects that take up time, or worse, that they'd rather do. Some members dominate meetings and little by little the other members lose interests. Teams fail to determine in advance how leadership will be shared, how conflicts will be resolved, and how decisions will be made. Challenges come up that lead to disagreements, and stronger personalities may win arguments leading to resentment and lack of commitment to decisions. Some members may believe a decision is going to be a majority rule, while others assume that a member with a particular expertise will have veto power. Many members see themselves as contributing the largest share of work. Think of teams you've been on recently, do you think that you did most of the work, or more work than other people? That's not unusual. Sometimes, subgroups form in the group and the daily work experience is diminished for everyone, and eventually commitment wanes, and commitment is key to team success. Most people want to do good work, and as a manager, you need to create the conditions that support that internal commitment. The random methods used to create teams combined with a poor launching mechanism, and the lack of a method for managing the teams throughout the work or a project, lead to team failures on one or both of these dimensions. Work quality and learning vis a vis team citizenship. Managers tend to focus solely on the work output. Is the deliverable on time? Does it meet expectations? We'll learn quite about this in the lessons on project management. Every time a manager creates and leads a team, they have the opportunity to develop each individual's capability to perform team citizenship behavior, and the capability of the team as a whole to collaborate. Let's define what we mean by team citizenship. I'm adapting the term from the literature on organizational citizenship. Team members display good team citizenship when they engage in activities that are not required, yet positively affect the team's dynamics and output. The behaviors include altruism and the attitude of work. All in this together also known as civic virtue, conscientiousness, courtesy, teamwork and team mindedness, peacekeeping, and cheer leading or encouraging. Effectively, good team citizenship means helping your team perform. Team members with more experience help newer members learn. Those who understand the organization strategy offer their manager useful suggestions and they engage in activities that enhance team spirit, morale, and cohesiveness. Research shows that citizenship behaviors can strongly influenced team outcomes across numerous dimensions. Productivity, efficiency, reduce costs customer satisfaction and turnover and when your team members engage in these behaviors, you the manager, have more time to focus on things that only you can do, like strategic planning or recruiting. Don't inculcate team citizenship solely to free up your time and attention. Overemphasizing them can lead to employee overload but do promote them. Research shows that the team leaders encouragement of these pro social behaviors, has a clear influence on the level of team citizenship. In collectivist cultures, team citizenship behaviors boost job performance ratings for those engaging in them. For many of us in the West, these behaviors can be deemed too difficult to measure, and therefore they're not commonly included in a job description. There's some organizations that hire, evaluate, and reward team citizenship, but not a lot of them. Team citizenship behaviors may be vague, but they have an outsize influence on performance as the leader and even when you are on a team as an equal member. Promoted model team citizenship. The amount of collaboration needed for a team to succeed depends on the level of interdependency in the team's task. Also, in snooped defined task interdependence, as the extent to which features of the work itself dictate that it can only be completed by the combined efforts of multiple individuals working together. There's two types of task interdependence. Pooled interdependence means that team members work on separate components that combine into a coherent, or numbers can work independently but their work in forms or influences other's work. Pooled tasks require team members to communicate well and to be willing to take the time to integrate their work with others work. Reciprocal interdependence means that the components of the tasks are tightly interconnected such that each person's work on their own components serves as input for the work of other team members. In some cases, reciprocal interdependence is so high that team members need to work synchronously with each other. Let's say you're remember of a rock band. Some members write song lyrics, others write music. Everyone practices their instruments. Much of this work might be pooled individuals can write and practice by themselves, while taking into account the skill level, or the style of the musicians and singers in their bands. Each person's work is influenced by the other band members even when the members are not present. Eventually, for a song to be any good, the band will get together, and hear how the words and the lyrics work, with the musical composition and with the instruments and vocals. This integration task is so highly reciprocal, they must work synchronously. While both pooled and reciprocal tasks are interdependent, the level of collaborative skill and willingness required, goes up, as tasks increase in interdependency. This takes training and practice which every team experience offers the leader the opportunity to provide. Over the long term, you want your teams to not only produce high quality work on time and on budget, but you also want to increase their team citizenship behaviors, and their ability to collaborate. How do you create, launch, and set the conditions for your teams to have the greatest chance of success on both dimension?
