Too Many Work Teams, Too Little Team Effectiveness Podcast

Welcome to My ‘Too Many Work Teams, Too Little Team Effectiveness’ Real Life Work Podcast!

This ‘Real Life Work’ podcast from 2023 focuses on the topic of ‘Too Many Work Teams, Too Little Team Effectiveness’. It explores different work teams types and the drivers of work team effectiveness.

Plus, it explores the characteristics of the three work team types found in all organizations. Finally, I close with the types of changes leaders need to improve the effectiveness of each work team type.

How effective are your work teams?

It has become a common work practice to use teams to improve organizational performance.  Unfortunately, widespread misuse of the team approach has resulted in a lot of confusion.

What constitutes a work team? What strategic focus should our different team types pursue?  In my opinion, all supervisors and managers are on at least one team. It’s the team of people they supervise / manage. Most teams do their process work at some place in a product or service value stream.

Other work teams execute processes that support one or more value streams each day. In a NextGen workplace, there are no departments – work integration exists. Finally, some workplaces have improvement teams that may part or full-time by design.

What Types of Teams are You On?

However, many supervisors and managers only see teams as those groups that meet away from the job to work on projects.  If you are not on a six sigma, kaizen, or process improvement team, you are not officially on a team.

In some work cultures, supervisors may not see themselves on any team. What’s your perspective?  Are you on a team?

At a minimum, strive to make your core work teams – the people who work together most of each day – more effective. Work to improve the cohesion and engagement levels within these groups.

At the same time, help them practice daily proactive process improvement. Finally, ensure they have effective work team leaders to support their daily value stream efforts.

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NextGen Leader Standard Work Drives Work Team Effectiveness

Organizations need consistent work team effectiveness to sustain high levels of performance.  To simply form teams, or give your groups the ‘team’ name, is not all true team effectiveness requires.

In this ‘Real Life Work‘ podcast, I comment on the role that a supervisor or manager plays as a process work team leader.  Also, I look at how the other two work team types – project teams and focus teams – support the daily continuous improvement efforts of each work group in the value stream.

Most importantly, I talk about how all formal leaders need time built into their daily jobs for team support. All too often, we expect our leaders to lead multiple groups without giving them the time to effectively do so.

How much time do your leaders have to coach their teams and improve process outcomes?