FACILITATING CHANGE

Mentorship
Mentorship is most valuable to an organization if done subtly and over a period of time.

Why teams fail:
• Lack of management leadership. Without support from the team’s manager, it will be almost impossible to function as a team.

• Inadequate communication with organised labour. In order for teams to work, people need to buy-in to the concept and take ownership of it. If shop stewards and other influential union people are not given the facts, they will be uncomfortable and their concerns will spill over to the teams. The lack of trust will halt the process before it starts.

• No clear justification for team creation. If the team does not know why it has been formed, there will be no reason for it to exist.

• No commitment or follow-through by team members.

• Incorrect management direction. The traditional manager is a micro-manager who budgets, plans and tells individuals what to do. The modern team manager takes on a different role. Should a team have a traditional manager, then it will be unable to function as a team simply because it will neither have the freedom nor the support to do so.

• Supervisors who take a ‘hands-off’ attitude. Supervisors are still responsible for the functioning of the team and must guide the team while it makes suggestions and comments.

• Team leaders who take on a semi-leadership role between the team and the supervisor. He or she is not an extra leader – he or she is a communication point.

• Individual goals and needs overriding the needs of the team. As a typical team grows, so individual members usually start seeing the benefits of teamwork as more important than their own. If personal goals take over instead, the team focus is shattered.

• A lack of challenges.

• Suppliers, sub-contractors or other outside agencies that are neither in line with the team nor are supportive of them, can derail the process.

• Lack of conflict handling abilities. Teams do not take shape immediately. They evolve, developing their own dynamics. If they do not have enough knowledge to handle conflict appropriately, the various forces at work in a team can cause significant barriers to effective team performance, stunting various stages of a team’s development.

• Lack of agreed focus. If you cannot build (and sustain) effective teams, you will become merely a collection of individuals pulling in different directions or, even worse, a faceless organisation.

• Company readiness. The transition from a group of individuals to a successful team requires time, preparation and support at all levels of the organisation. The substantial benefits from teams can blind organisations to the potential pitfalls and can lead to failure. Some of those pitfalls are inappropriate operations or lack of organisational readiness; failure to change recognition and reward structures and systems; poor involvement and enrolment of supervisors and middle managers; failure to transfer power to the teams; competitive market and technological challenges and failure to create a hierarchy of teams.