DC Velocity - December 2015

AS FOOTBALL REIGNS AND BASKETBALLS BOUNCE IN THE wings, thinking about teams is inescapable. In most all team sports, split-second and intimate interactions are paramount to success. (Baseball is a bit of an exception, with more room for the freewheeling cavorting of superstars and misfits—not mutually exclusive categories.)

In our supply chain world, opportunities and needs for team effort and collaborative solutions abound—even overwhelm: Corporate implementation of an ERP. Installation of a new warehouse management system. A process redesign in the facility’s pick/pack/ship operations. A move to a new DC. Integration of automated equipment into material handling operations. And on and on.

Teams have been a fact of life in our organizations for a couple of generations now. The once-vaunted cross-functional team approach has been around long enough to become a cliché. This approach, now an anachronism, was a useful beginning in assembling a variety of functional skills for complex problem solving. But cross-functional presence alone falls far short of what it takes to make truly effective teams—and can actually create seriously suboptimized solutions.

Without denigrating the importance of having competency resident in teams, there are a few levels of planning, selection, and leadership without which teams risk falling off the edge of a cliff into an abyss of failure.

TEAM FUNCTIONS, ROLES, AND BEHAVIORS

Classical team research shows that, while the nomenclature may
vary, all teams must have embedded within them specific roles
that are critical to success. For instance, in management consultant
Glenn Parker’s work, we find:
b Contributors: Those who typically provide the nuts-and-bolts–
type functional skills and expertise
b Communicators: Those who, along with providing useful func-
tional skills, work to foster a strong sense of group interaction,
mutual trust, and alignment on goals and behaviors
b Challengers: Those who test concepts, demand consideration of
alternatives, and (while appearing to obstruct progress) keep the
team from disastrous outcomes
b Collaborators: The big-picture visionaries; the forward-looking

BY ART VAN BODEGRAVEN basictraining

Go, team, go!
Win one for the Gipper!

folks who are committed to reaching the Shining City on the Hill, sometimes overlooking pesky details and dismissing challenges.

Other practitioners classify team members as task-oriented, goal-directed, process-oriented, and idea-challenging. Please note that the tendency to identify four classes of team members in no way indicates that the team should be restricted to just four individuals. Teams can be large and complex, Importantly, a little examination will reveal that whatever the role nomenclature, team members’ preferences, styles, and behaviors will map very closely with the sundry assessment tools that have become popular in business, industry, the military, and government in the past several decades. This recognition is vital, in that simply knowing what you’ve got with respect to team composition is not likely to get you where you need to go in a world that demands results.

There are many tools available to help the savvy leader to build with purpose and determination high-performing teams; merely accepting what you’ve been handed has worse odds of winning than a Mega Millions lottery.