Building and Leading Effective Teams

Building and leading teams are recognized to be activities essential for effective managers. Common sense tells us that a team is a group of individuals interacting to achieve particular objectives, or who share a common goal. Our principal concern with this understanding is that it does not allow us to gain competence in building and leading effective teams because it fails to take into account how teams are effectively constituted and what do they do t be effective as teams.

In all effective teams, sooner or later, leadership shows up. This doesn’t happen because an individual has the desire or drive to be a leader, but because leadership is demanded by the necessity to coordinate action in a coherent way. Leadership is called for by the need for the outcomes to be produced by the team, and the commitment to produce them in a way that satisfies some customer for the result. Leadership may be present when the team is constituted, when it is declared into existence with its roles, standards and practices, and will play an active role in its constitution. When this is not the case, if leadership doesn’t appear quickly, the team disintegrates.

In this workshop, we will put forward a new understanding of what a team is. This will open up the possibility of designing and leading teams as a domain of permanent learning and innovation for individuals. We will also put forth what it takes to lead effective teams..