Team Development

What do zebras have to do with organizational behavior? Quite a lot, actually. Zebras are deeply social animals that survive and thrive through cooperation and adaptation. each zebra serves different valued roles, such as watching for predators while others are sleeping or leading the herd to better feeding grounds. Herds consist of up to a dozen zebras, so the animals know each other well enough to work effectively together.

Successful organizations are similar to zebra herds: they support a culture of cooperation and team-work, recognizing that each employee plays a vital role in the organization's overall success. How well each team succeeds depends on the individual's contribution as well as cooperation among team members and effective leadership. Like zebras, surviving organizations also adapt to the changing environment of new technologies, and emerging customer and employee expectations. So, Zebras figured it out long ago!

Research shows that outstanding teams deliver 30-40% more discretionary performance than its individuals would have been able to alone. There are four dimensions that drive team performance:

• Clarity of Purpose : What is the team trying to accomplish?
• Clarity of Function : Who does what on the team?
• Clarity of Processes: How does the team accomplish its work?
• Chemistry: How do team members interact?

The fundamental characteristic of the relatively unaligned team is wasted energy. Individuals may work extraordinarily hard, but their efforts do not efficiently translate to team effort. By contrast, when a team becomes more aligned, a commonality of direction emerges, and individuals' energies harmonize. There is less wasted energy,. In fact, a resonance or synergy develops, like the "coherent" light of a laser rather than the incoherent and scattered light of a light bulb. There is commonality of purpose, a shared vision, and understanding of how to complement one another's efforts. Individuals do not sacrifice their personal interests to the larger team vision; rather, the shared vision becomes an extension of their personal visions. In fact, alignment is the necessary condition before empowering the individual will empower the whole team. Empowering the individual when there is a relatively low level of alignment worsens the chaos and makes managing the team even more difficult. Peter M. Senge

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