High Performance Teams (HPT)
High performance teams at
my work place bring out the optimum solutions for the most critical and complex
problems. At Boeing HPT’s play a very significant role in analysis for
decisions that involve a lot of expense and have a critical time limit. The
major elements of high performance teams are; they actively shape the
expectations of those who use their output, they rapidly adjust performance to
the shifting needs of the situation, they innovate on the fly, they grow steadily
stronger and over time members come to know one another better in strengths and
weaknesses, the members grow individually and develop interchangeable skills,
the team has goals that become more important than anything else and their
motto becomes to succeed together or fail together. HPT’s are very important in
a company just like any other team but these teams carry special attention and
focus by management.
At Boeing we have a
number of HPT’s for special projects, which are created for a purpose and then
dissolved once the task is accomplished. Before the development of the 787,
there was a HPT that sat down for months and months to go over the pro’s and
con’s of the whole engineering process and finally they decided to go with the
project and make it happen. I think this is a great example of the HPT that
worked at Boeing. Then there are lots of HPT’s working on different issues
connected to the airplane at different times. A company like Boeing with highly
specialized people can have a HPT any time and resolve any issue. Recently
there was a HPT formed to implement the “lean System” integration at the Boeing
Everett factory and the plan they came up with was highly successful. Boeing
has a vast list of technical people who have excelled in their respective
fields and become a part of such teams.
It is of prime
importance that the team believes in shared values when they target a common
goal meeting the organization mission and vision. It is very difficult to get
from “me” to “we” as per (Denning, 2007) because people work with different
values. It is the reason why people end up being at worse state than they were
before collaboration. But if the values of people are aligned with the
organizational values, collaboration results will be good and everyone feels
good. That is the reason companies like Boeing tend to train people to be in
alignment with the organizational values. It still becomes different while
dealing with diverse cultures and people working in the different corners of
the world like the suppliers of 787. This airplane is being built by suppliers
in different countries and very different cultures than Boeing Company. We have
daily meetings to collaborate on various issues and it is indeed very
difficult.
The four patterns of
working together work group, team, community and network have their own good
and bad. While the work group has people who were specialized in their fields
there is no active collaboration required to get the job done. The good thing
is they work independently and focus on what they do and the negative aspect of
this is that there s no collaboration and hence no interchangeable skill
learning process. Team is the next working together pattern and teams tend to
work together and achieve more as a good thing but the bad thing in a team is
that everybody is not a team worker. They need more control and focus to get
things done. They need to understand each other and be dependent on each
other’s expertise. Community is the next pattern and the good thing is they
share the common values and interests. The bad thing is they are heterogeneous
and diverse. Most of the community work is voluntary and hence there is less
motivation to get things done. It also
generally involves a lot more people than a team. The last is the network and
it can have thousands of people working together. The good thing is that it has
a lot of people and any type of issue can be communicated in a flash and spread
like a viral. The bad thing is people have no sense of closeness due to no face
to face contact. They have no feeling of oneness but only know each other by
nicknames.
My experience with
teams has been both good and bad. There have been meetings where we
accomplished a lot and there have been times when there was total frustration.
I am not a big community member but I do go to some community meeting where
people come and go. Being a voluntary work, it does accomplish a lot but only
because the leader has not changed for a long time. I know for sure if the
leader changes,
the whole community is going to fall apart. For teams I have been through teams
where some team members come not prepared and then the whole agenda of discussion
falls apart. If the member would have been prepared, knowing that the whole discussion
depend on their take on the discussion, the whole meeting and the outcome would
have been very successful. Networking is a great tool of today and a privilege
to have but the meetings we have with suppliers in other countries and no face
to face contact, most of the times the suppliers do not care about what we have
to say and depend on the top level decision makers, which hurts our people.
Networking is a great tool but no face to face discussion sometimes leads to
not a very successful outcome and hence proves to be a bane instead of a boon.
Ref:
Denning,
S. (2011). The Leader's Guide to Storytelling. San Francisco, California:
Jossey-Bass
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