How to Launch a Team: Start Right for Success. Kim Kanaga

      THE IDEAS INTO ACTION GUIDEBOOK SERIES

      This series of guidebooks draws on the practical knowledge that the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®) has generated in the course of more than thirty years of research and educational activity conducted in partnership with hundreds of thousands of managers and executives. Much of this knowledge is shared—in a way that is distinct from the typical university department, professional association, or consultancy. CCL is not simply a collection of individual experts, although the individual credentials of its staff are impressive; rather it is a community, with its members holding certain principles in common and working together to understand and generate practical responses to today’s leadership and organizational challenges.

      The purpose of the series is to provide managers with specific advice on how to complete a developmental task or solve a leadership challenge. In doing that, the series carries out CCL’s mission to advance the understanding, practice, and development of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide. We think you will find the Ideas Into Action Guidebooks an important addition to your leadership toolkit.

      Table of Contents

       The Right Start Is Critical to Success

       Launching a Successful Team

       Setting Purpose and Direction

       Defining Roles and Responsibilities

       Designing Procedures and Practices

       Building Cooperation and Relationships

       Countdown to Team Success

       Suggested Readings

       Background

       Key Point Summary

       EXECUTIVE BRIEF

      When an organization sponsors a team, it’s usually to address a challenge deemed essential to organizational success. Meeting that challenge might mean implementing new ways of working, entering new markets, or developing a new product. Teams can produce innovative solutions, but leading them toward that goal can be difficult. Getting the team off on the right foot is critical to its success. To launch a team in a way that increases its chance of success, managers and team leaders should pay attention to four critical points: setting purpose and direction, defining roles and responsibilities, designing procedures and practices, and building cooperation and relationships. Understanding and implementing these elements is key to a successful launch and, in the end, essential to a team’s achieving the organization’s goals.

      The Right Start Is Critical to Success

      Teams are a popular approach to many business challenges. They can produce innovative solutions to complex problems, enabling organizations to be faster, more responsive, more competitive, and more successful in meeting their missions. But these kinds of results aren’t guaranteed. It’s not always easy for teams to deliver high performance, and the price of team failure can be very high. One of the first steps to take toward increasing team effectiveness is to pay attention to how the team is formed. You can head off most of the problems that beset teams during the formation stage by setting a clear direction, securing organizational support, selecting the right team members, building an enabling team design, developing key relations, and monitoring external factors.

      Still, even if you have formed your team with those guidelines in mind, high performance isn’t inevitable. A well-planned and orchestrated team launch is crucial to keeping your team moving toward success. Right from the beginning, team members have to know what their mission is, how success will be measured, and how they will work together. From the start they need to feel inspired by the opportunity to serve on a team, be confident that they will have the resources and support needed for success, and feel good about the people they will depend on to accomplish the team’s mission.

      The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) has a long history of work with teams. In the course of that work it has become clear that four sets of activities spell the difference between a successful team launch and an unsuccessful

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