Group items tagged

Summary: "Most teams underperform. Yours can beat the odds. If you need the best practices and ideas for superior team building--but don't have time to find them--this book is for you. Here are 10 inspiring and useful perspectives, all in one place. This collection of HBR articles will help you: boost team performance through mutual accountability, motivate large, diverse groups to tackle complex projects, increase groups' emotional intelligence, reverse the fortunes of a struggling team, prevent decision deadlock, extract results from a bunch of touchy superstars, fight constructively with top-management colleagues, and ensure productivity in far-flung teams."

Boostzone review on work

Tips to deal with communications problems in virtual work settings. the author emphasizes that they stem from lacking context when mostly communicating with email and phone - another way (than those mentioned) to overcoming them is to use more sophisticated tools and communicating at multiple channels

More structure can be better than more freedom to foster collaboration. Yet, it is not the goals a team leader needs to define but the roles of each team member need to be clarified so they are well understood by all.

Webreview of the future of work April 2012

modern leadership is about communication and trust. This is about how control is replaced with communication in today's companies. 

Summary: "The scores of successful virtual teams the authors examined didn't have many of the psychological and practical obstacles that plagued their more traditional, face-to-face counterparts. Team members felt freer to contribute--especially outside their established areas of expertise. The fact that such groups could not assemble easily actually made their projects go faster, as people did not wait for meetings to make decisions, and individuals, in the comfort of their own offices, had full access to their files and the complementary knowledge of their local colleagues. Reaping those advantages, though, demanded shrewd management of a virtual team's work processes and social dynamics. Rather than depend on videoconferencing or e-mail, which could be unwieldy or exclusionary, successful virtual teams made extensive use of sophisticated online team rooms, where everyone could easily see the state of the work in progress, talk about the work in ongoing threaded discussions, and be reminded of decisions, rationales, and commitments. Differences were most effectively hashed out in teleconferences, which team leaders also used to foster group identity and solidarity."

Yochai Benkler

A review of the literature on self-managed or self-directed work groups lends itself to the fact that more and more organizations are changing as a more competitive global society emerges. As a result, individual, team, and organizational roles are much different now than they were even twenty years ago. In order to stay competitive, organizations must allow themselves to evolve. By tapping into an ever present resource, their employees, the organization gains a wealth of expertise, enabling them to transform externally and, as a result, transforms internally to a healthier work environment. In spite of the challenges, self-managed work groups are an obvious win-win solution in our ever changing environment.