Building Collaborative Teams

• Executing major initiatives• Integrating a newly acquired firm• Overhauling an IT system

• Complex Teams– Large– Virtual– Diverse– Specialized

The Paradox

• Teams that are large, virtual, diverse and composed of highly educated specialists are crucial with challenging projects but those some four characteristics make it hard for teams to get anything done.

How can executives strengthen an organization's ability to perform complex collaborative tasks to maximize the effectiveness of large, diverse teams, while minimizing the disadvantages of their structure and composition?

• Executive Support• HR Practices• The Strength a team leader• Structure of the team

Executive Support

Investing in Signature Relationship•Royal Bank of Scotland’s CEO commissioned new headquarter Build around an indoor atrium by investing 350 million pound.

•British Petroleum moves employees across the functions, businesses and countries as part of their career development.

Modeling Collaborative Behavior•The members of general management committee will frequently serve as substitute for one another.•The executives know and understand the entire business and can fill in for each other easily for any task.•To make this behavior visible they travel extensively .•This investment in face to face interaction creates many opportunity for people across the company to see top executives in action

Creating a “Gift Culture”

Mentoring and coaching become embedded in their own routine behavior

Focused HR Practices

Ensuring the Requisite SkillsTraining on team work, emotional intelligence, networking, holding difficult conversation, corporate social responsibility, and communicating the firm’s strategy and shared values.

Training in selling and relationship management. Its not about selling techniques but on how Lehman values its clients.

Supporting a Sense of CommunityGroup events such as women’s network, cooking weekends, tennis coaching or creating policies and practices to encourage teams.

Change Management teams with in company’s enterprise service function. These informal groups were responsible for projects associated with the implementation of new technology throughout the bank.

Many of HR investments reinforces family like culture.Every communication reflects an element of staff appreciation.Spontaneous activities create sense of fun and community.http://www.blogs.marriott.com/

The Right Team Leaders

• Task Oriented• Relationship Oriented

Building on Heritage Relationship

New teams, particularly those with a high proportion of members who are strangers at the time of formation, find it more difficult to collaborate than those with established relationship

Building on Heritage Relationship

When it needs to transfer skills across business functions or units , the entire small team is moved instead of reshuffling individual people to new positions.

Understanding Role Clarity & Task Ambiguity

Understanding Role Clarity & Task Ambiguity

An exceptional record of role clarity despite of the large size of the team.

• Executive support– Signature relationship practices– Modeling collaborative behavior– Creating a “ gift culture”•Focused HR Practices

•Ensuring requisite skills•Supporting a string sense of community•Task and Relationship oriented leaders•Team formation and Structure

–Building a Heritage Relationship–Understanding role clarity and task ambiguity