Build Better Teams

Creating Winning Teams in the Digital Age

George Karseras

• Publisher: Mango
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642506938
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

High Performing Teams Foster Healthy Business Cultures and More!

" Build Better Teams is an insightful book offering leaders a compelling and practical team building 'code' to optimize team performance."— Professor Amy C. Edmondson, Harvard Business School

Want to learn how to be a good leader today? Build Better Teams is an efficient tool to develop highly effective leaders along with their high performing teams in the post-Covid remote and hybrid working world.

Learn how to be a good leader today! The workplace is constantly changing so learn how to navigate the changes with Build Better Teams. Most leadership management books are difficult to read, but George Karseras, executive team development coach and founder of TeamUp, has clearly laid out proven tools and examples to produce high performing teams. Learn about necessary and timely techniques to cultivate highly effective leaders at all levels of your organization.

Team engagement in real-life examples! Learn how to be a good leader today! Combining over twenty years of experience in team development, Build Better Teams breaks down the historically poor track record of team engagement in organizations, references well-researched and relevant academic studies, and equips leaders with practical tools and techniques. Karseras includes stories, examples, and tips in a casual, easy to read format. These practices are great for hybrid or fully remote/virtual teams.

Inside, you'll find:

• Techniques and tools on how to foster high performance in your team
• How to develop a strong business culture and obtain leadership goals
• How to cultivate highly effective leadership styles and practices

If you're looking for diversity training books or books for leaders like Stick Together, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, or Team of Teams, then you'll love Build Better Teams.

Part 1 

Extreme Teaming 

Chapter 1

Extreme Times for Extreme Teams

The teams Ed formed with Luke and then Cho, qualified for “extreme team” status as lives were at stake. Not many of us would have put our hands up and volunteered to join this type of team. Yet so many of us, in our own way, belong to extreme teams. Even though we may not be risking our lives, many of the conditions faced in the Amazon in 2008 are very similar to those we now endure. Much of Ed’s success revolved around his team’s perseverance, mental strength, resourcefulness, and talent to make their expedition a success. We require a bit more than these qualities to succeed. The pressures of today conspire to make teaming in our places of work so exceptionally difficult, unquestionably more so than any of us have ever experienced before. Understanding these current day dynamics will help us to equip ourselves to better deal with them.

The Digitally Transforming VUCA World

Ed and his two teams faced unknown after unknown after unknown. In our places of work, we are enduring digital transformation after digital transformation after digital transformation, each one taking us into unknown territories. Agile working, robotics, automation, and AI are all producing huge disruption as we are forced to innovate, migrate expensive architecture and shed thousands of jobs. Many organizations are now grappling with the cloud and how to best leverage it. Most teams, no matter where they sit in the value chain, are smack bang middle in the world of VUCA. The uncertainty and pace of change is so fierce, for some of us we might as well be in the jungle surrounded by flesh eating piranhas and jaguar.

Apparently, the aim of digitalizing our places of work is to leverage advances in our tech to simplify and make life easier for our customers. Most leaders of the teams I work with would say that right now, it is achieving the polar opposite. You might also point to stress, pressure, anxiety, and fatigue. As one board member of a major UK institution told me recently:

“It’s been a relentless slog.”

For many reading this, digitalization and all that it brings means you have to move at the speed of light, rapidly learn, innovate, pivot, collaborate across boundaries and influence without positional power. Pivoting is not simply unilaterally making a change in direction and hoping that everyone else follows suit, and learning is no longer achieved simply by going on courses, taking notes, and accruing personal know-how. Both are team sports. We all have to become far more intelligent in how to team these days. We have to understand, at a far more pronounced level, how to create the conditions that produce team outcomes rather than individual outcomes. Ed couldn’t just change direction in the jungle; he had to synchronize with the rest of the team. It’ll be the same for you.

Many are of the opinion that thanks to the pace of tech, we’ll never ever actually return to a steady state. That these transformations are not going away any time soon. Indeed, only last year, the 2020 Gartner Digital Enterprise Survey found that 67 percent of business leaders agreed that if their company did not become significantly more digitalized, their organizations would no longer be competitive. Most of these global senior managers were already experiencing some sort of digital transformation before they even took part in this survey. It’s a miracle they had the time to complete the survey.(1)

Virtual Working

One of the consequences of tech advancement has been the adoption of virtual working. The reality is COVID-19 simply turbo boosted an already existing trend. As we all know by now, it is much tougher to lead and participate in the virtual team, or partially virtual team than a non-virtual one. It’s not just a question of making sure we are presentable and sharp on screen. As we’ll discover in Chapter Eight, ensuring the team is on the same page, well-coordinated, with minimum interpersonal conflict are the main challenges we face. Not so long ago I coached the executive risk team in a well-known UK financial institution and, at the same time, the CIO and his team at a well-known global software business whose clients happened to include the very same financial institution. It was ironic that in both teams, there was conflict which centered on a team member working in a certain city in Scotland. At one point I wondered if it was the same person. It turned out it wasn’t someone pocketing two salaries, but the only person in both teams who was working totally remotely.

Complexity from Diversity

We all know that diversity is a good thing from a moral and ethical standpoint, but did you know that diverse teams, if well led, perform better than the more homogenous?(2-6) More diversity means more complexity, though, and more complexity, as you may have found out, usually equates to more stress. These days, you have to deal with diversity in diversity.

Age Diversity

Globally, we have seen retirement ages rise from an average of sixty to sixty-five with some forecasting it will go up to seventy-five within the next ten to fifteen years. Coupled with falling birth rates, particularly in developed countries, this means that we can expect to see the proportion of older workers, our Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) increasing.(7) Meanwhile it has been estimated that by 2025, the younger Millennial generation (born 1980–2000), will make up 75 percent of the global workforce.(8) And let’s not forget the Silent generation (born pre-1946). Mick Gibson, a postman in Derbyshire UK is still going strong at eighty! Good on him, I say. However, managers are now leading teams composed of all these generations plus Gen X (1965–1980) and Gen Zs (1995–2010) all at the same time. The inclusion of an unprecedented four different generations in the workplace, with a fifth on the way, is expected to create more complexity and ultimately more conflict to manage in the team. (9; 10)

Telling stories and anecdotes and using language that connects with all ages can’t be easy, nor can employing a leadership style that works for all. Baby Boomers are generally more comfortable working alone under a chain of command and are less comfortable collaborating(11) while their Millennial team members prefer their bosses to be less paternalistic and more socially responsible.(12; 13)

Diversity of Tenure

Ed and his team saw a high turnover of guides, continually hiring new ones as they progressed along the Amazon. This was because their guides were only able to guide in the territories they knew. In our places of work, Millennials are less tolerant of role uncertainty than their older colleagues and as a result, just like Ed’s guides, they move around more. They are also in a better position to move jobs as they are more likely to be single—three times more in fact than “Silents” were at comparable ages. Additionally they are far better educated and much more likely to be living in cities than their predecessors,(14) both of which provide them with even more mobility. All the above explain why they are more likely to move jobs and take on more jobs over their careers than Gen Xers, and spend less time in each job than Boomers.(15) In Western organizations, Millennials are also more ambitious, ...

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Teams that Walk the Amazon
• Part 1
• Extreme Times for Extreme Teams
• In Search of the Holy Grail
• Part 2
• Building Swift Trust
• The Code
• The Code in the Amazon
• Part 3
• Digitalization and the Code
• Virtual Teaming and the Code
• Part 4
• How to Get Set
• How to Get Safe
• How to Get Strong
• Part 5
• The Third Rail
• It’s Our Destiny
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• References