POST-HEROIC TEAMS

Psych 15: Organizational Development

Yvonne Joy L. Guerta

BSPsychology III
Team members see success as
something jointly, not individually,
achieved. Each team member
knows that success comes from
working together, sharing
knowledge and resources in pursuit
of a common goal. Effective teams
are post-heroic.
POST HEROIC
- Is an approach to leadership that can better access
untapped talent and to improve performance, as it
frees up the workforce to be more agile and
innovative

TEAMS
- Two or more individuals with a degree of
interdependence geared toward the achievement of a
goal or the completion of a task.
THE MISSING “I”
 When I speak on team building, it is around this point
that someone in the room exhibits an apparently
uncontrollable need to remind every present that “there
is no “I” in team”
 Its critical for a team to be able work together and for
members of the team not to be competing with one
another.
 When you have too much “I” no one can agree on what
he or she seeing. To o much “I” and missing “I”
produces much the same degree of blindness.
 When you have a team that is all ‘I’ and no “we”, then
you also have people who are afraid to bring anyone
who might be viewed as competition.
WHY TEAM FAILS
 The great benefits of teams is that they provide a
variety of skills and perspectives.
 Effective team building involves ,more than just
agreeing on a set of goals, especially since
agreement on goals is difficult to get when team
members cannot even agree on how to work
together.
 It involves building a common language, a
common set of values and beliefs about how to
work, how to interact, and how to behave.
WHAT IS THE LIFE CYCLE
OF A TEAM?
 Teams need to create common ground.
 The most important lesson around dealing with teams is
recognizing that teams go through a distinct and unavoidable
life cycle, and this cycle takes time.
 The lifecycle of a team is best described by Tuckman’s stages
of team development.
 Bruce Tuckman, a psychologist who first developed the
model 1965.
 Susan Wheelan, another psychologist whose work has
focused extensively on group dynamics, further details
and extends Tuckman’s model.
These stages are Forming, Storming, Norming,
Performing, and Adjourning
Forming
 this is the most critical stage
 characterized by a great deal of uncertainty and
discomfort.
 People tend to be overly polite and tentative. The
biggest fear of being excluded, of the group
suddenly realizing that you don’t actually belong or
you realizing that you’re in the wrong place.
 during this phase, team members determine whether or
not they feel emotionally and intellectually safe working
with one another. They develop sense of group identity
or remain a collection of individuals.
 The most important thing you can do during Forming is
increase members sense of comfort and belongingness to
the team, essentially building their sense of safety and
community.
 The most important things you can do is help your team
develop good discussion and problem solving skill.
 A mark of Forming is that work never gets done when
the leader is not there.
 The process takes at least two months.
Trying to force people through it seems to fail
approximately s hundred times out of hundred.
Storming
 It is like when we least expected after you have started to
feel comfortable and safe.
 The very sense of safety and personal investment in the
goals of the team that you need in order to achieve
productivity also sets the stage for Storming to begin.
 Heroic behavior will often become manifest in Storming,
although it can sometimes start during Forming.
 Heroic behavior is when people put in dramatically long
hours or otherwise make sure that everyone notices their
extreme sacrifices on the part of the company.
 Typically last at least two months, and once again the odds
of speeding it up successfully are about the same as for
rushing through Forming.
Norming
• Characterized by the development of trust and formation
of organization structure.
Teams at this point have learned to argue effectively.
members are communicating with one another in a
fairly open structure.
 In terms of goal setting, you’ll see greater understanding
of and commitment to the organization’s goals. Team
members not only care about the vision, but they are
starting to believe that they can make it happen and that
their efforts matter to the group.
 Typically lasts a month of longer and is again, difficult or
impossible to speed up. Approximately 25 percent of
teams get stuck here
Performing
 If you’ve reached the performing, or high-performance, stage.
You have a post heroic team!
 Team will now understand how to utilize all available
resources. It will spontaneously and automatically adjust
itself to bring the strongest combination of people and
skills as to bear on any particular problem.
 Team members know their jobs and how to help other
people.
 One of the biggest obstacles to a team achieving and
maintaining, high-performance is a manager who doesn’t
understand how to lead it.
 The most difficult part of leading a high-performance team is
keeping at the level.
 The biggest danger a high-performance team faces is
born-out.
Maintaining high performance for long periods is
physically and mentally exhausting for team
members.
 Another big problem faced by high performance teams
is boredom.
The duties of the team or the project the team is
working on can start feeling like the same old,
same old
Adjourning
 Most organizational groups have a definite life span.
Sometimes the dissolution of the group is planned,
sometimes it is unplanned.
 In general, the dissolution of a team is often stressful and
unpleasant for its members. People may engage in a flurry
of work in an effort to deny the inevitable.
 Argument may increase and communication begin to break
down.
 It is very important for the leader of a terminating team to
be aware of the stress that the event is causing in the lives
of the team members.
How Do I build my team?
• Team development takes time
• Management and the employees must both be aware of and
comfortable with the idea that building trust does not
happen instantly.
Its not easy to develop that intuitive understanding of
other peoples work style.
• There is a tension between building affiliation with the
team and the company and providing each person with as
much freedom to work the way he or she want to work, as
possible
Don’t let autonomy destroy affiliation or affiliation
destroy autonomy. You need to be both successful.
• Build a series of small success.
Each success helps the team develop confidence
and an increasing sense of its own abilities
• Competition within the team is not a sign of progress.
However, it is natural in the early stages of team
development.
THANK YOU!
-YJLG