slides

1. Team Performance
at the TOP Levels of
Management:
Difficult Challenges
Chapter 11
Chad Burghardt

2. Table of Contents
● Top Team Characteristics
● Senior Executives ‘Working Groups’
● Working Group vs Team
● Why Teams are Tougher to Form at Top
● Case Studies
● Breaking Through to Team Performance at
Top
● Lessons of High Performance

3. “A great Top Team extends the
values, mission, and plan throughout
the company, aligns the company and
accelerates its growth.
A dysfunctional team can tear a
company apart and send it down the
tubes.”

4. Senior Executives
more comfortable
operating in
working groups
Focused on individual performance
Performance contract between
executives and leader
Not limited by mutual
accountability

5. Top Management
has much greater
impact on
organizational
outcomes than
CEO alone
Organizations evaluate the
behaviors, attributes, and
leadership styles of CEOs and top
management teams.
As strategic leaders, top
management incorporate
Behavioral Flexibility.

6. Working Group
Performance May
Be Enough
‘Working groups are neither
good nor bad’
Top executives often have
competing and complex
challenges, not enough
time, and competing
power/resource needs and
perform better as working
groups than teams

7. Differences between Working Group and Team
● Strong, clearly focused leader
● Individual Accountability
● Group’s purpose is same as
organization mission
● Individual work-products
● Runs efficient meetings
● Measures effectiveness
indirectly by influence on others
● Discusses, decides, delegates
Team
● Shared leadership roles
● Individual and mutual accountability
● Specific team purpose
● Collective work-products
● Encourages open-ended discussions
● Measures performance directly by
assessing collective work products
● Discusses, decides, and does real work
together
Working Group

8. Why Teams Are
Tougher To Form
At The Top

9. “The Purpose of the
team at the top is
identical to the
purpose of the
company.”
Top executives are
responsible for the
company’s purpose, not
necessarily team purpose

10. “The whole top group
has to be ‘on the
team.’ ”
No need to be a single team
Focus on identifying
performance challenges
that require team approach,
and assemble teams to
accomplish them

11. “The role and
contribution of team
members, including
the leader, are defined
by their hierarchical
and functional
positions.”
Deeply ingrained bias
towards individual
accountability and
achievement
Greater risks of personal
failures
Confidence in pursuing
individual roles,
uncomfortable with idea of
team behavior patterns

12. “Spending extra time
is inefficient.”
Top executives rarely have
spare time
As a top management
group, goal is to minimize
time spent together with
well-prioritized agendas

13. “Team effectiveness
depends only on
communications and
openness.”
Misconception that
equates teamwork with
teams
Does not necessarily
reflect team work-
products or mutual
accountability

14. Slader Field
Idea: Better company
performance through
restructuring
Slader Field CEO, Jeff Selkirk
Single decision point by CEO to structure
company differently to boost performance.
Although restructuring held support from the
senior management and top executives, only
individual commitments were made.
No mutual accountability.
Resulted in motivated working group, but was
NOT a team.
Much potential performance was left behind.

15. Lake Geneva Executive
Team
Team that believes
performance depends
heavily on great
executive leadership
Lake Geneva Multinational Corporation
Team formed to evaluate and promote quality
executives.
Emphasizes mutual accountability.
Open conflict and debate, supportive and
constructive.
Decisions not biased on hierarchy of
company or formal positions of team
members.
Clearly outlined team roles.
Flexible leadership.

16. Breaking Through
To Team
Performance At
The Top

17. “Carving out team
assignments that
tackle specific
issues.”
Identify specific team
goals
Realize those objectives
Improve processes

18. “Assigning work to
subsets of the team.”
Assign specific tasks to
individual(s) with
expectation to deliver
essential work-products
for integration with entire
team

19. “Determining team
membership based on
skill, not position.”
Skill based members avoid
constraints of hierarchical
memberships
Allows for multiple smaller
teams to address
particular issues with
different skill profiles

20. “Requiring all
members to do
equivalent amounts of
real work.”
Work assignments call on
all members, including
team leader, to share real
work
Sweat equity is apparent in
whole team, increasing
firsthand knowledge of
output of work-product

21. “Breaking down the
hierarchical pattern of
interaction.”
Work assignments made
regardless of hierarchical
positions.
Leading by example,
engaging in production
line to emphasize team
work-product

22. “Setting and following
rules of behavior
similar to those used
by other teams.”
Top managers facilitate
greater degree of mutual
accountability by setting
and following same rules
to help teams provide
focus, avoid hierarchical
constraints, promote
openness, commitment,
and trust

23. Top executives in working groups
and teams must incorporate these
lessons to break through to high
performance at the top, with these
team characteristics in mind.

24. References
Ferrel, J. & Kraus, A. (2016). The Effect of Top Management Team Performance and Cohesion on Organizational Outcomes. Society for
Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Retrieved from http://www.siop.org/WhitePapers/Visibility/EffectofTopManagement.pdf
Katzenbach, J. & Smith, D. (2002). The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. Boston, Mass: Harvard
Business School Press. HarperBusiness Publishers.
Matthews, J. (2001). A Top Team is Key to Growth. Kauffman Entrepreneurs. Retreived from
https://www.entrepreneurship.org/articles/2001/03/a-top-team-is-key-to-growth