BUILDING TEAMS THROUGH LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
This paper discusses ways in which leadership and management can be used to build one of the most valuable tools available to contemporary managers: the staff team. To be most effective, team members must be carefully selected and transformed into working units. This expert task requires leadership skills to analyze the work to be accomplished, recruit team players with complementary skills and ways of doing the job, and launch the group in the right direction. Teams can provide businesses with extraordinarily inspired solutions to problems. A skilled manager can unleash a powerful force in a team that is built well.
Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith write, "A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable" (45). One of the current leading business researchers in America, Tom Peters, writes unequivocally of the necessity for teams, "It's arrogant to suggest that you can 'manage' at all from the center in a fickle economy. The best you can do is unleash the power of subordinate units with distinct personalities of their own" (9).
Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal write about "the critical role that the group occupies in the relationship between individual and organization" (204). Katzenbach and Smith contend, "We believe that teams--real teams, not just groups that management call "teams"--should be the basic unit of performance for most organizations" (15).
While they are a natural way to accomplish business tasks, teams do not simply spring into being of their own accord. Managers must create them, and they must first determine what the team needs to accomplish. Setting specific goals that measure the effectiveness of the work accomplished can be one of the first duties the team accomplished, "yet most potential teams," write Katzenb...