Welcome to My ‘Too Many Work Teams, Too Little Team Effectiveness’ Real Life Work Podcast!
by Kevin McManus, Great Systems LLC
I call my second ‘Real Life Work’ podcast of 2023 ‘Too Many Work Teams, Too Little Team Effectiveness’. This podcast focuses on the drivers of work team effectiveness. Plus, it explores the characteristics of the three work team types found in all organizations. Finally, it explores what types of changes are needed 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 relative to what constitutes a team and what the focus of different team types should be. In my opinion, all supervisors and managers are on at least one team. It’s the team of people they supervise / manage.
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. What’s your perspective? Are you on a team?
At a minimum, strive to make your process 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 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?
LISTEN to my ‘Too Many Work Teams, Too Little Team Effectiveness’ post as a podcast!
Keep improving!
Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer, Great Systems
www.greatsystems.com kevin@greatsystems.com
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