Always Team E-Book

Manuel Jork

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: EDITION 99
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 76

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Teams change constantly. They unfold in phases. These are not always easy to detect. Therefore, we offer you an advanced model of teamphases. Goal and purpose is to unfold teams to the stage of self-organization and to overcome old hierarchical leadership models. This is your action guide to develop high level teams and to create impact at the interfaces to ensure necessary transformation of your organization.

Leseprobe

Thinking and acting together, thus teaming up and joining forces with a mindset of cooperation and cocreation in a post-hierarchical leadership environment is our purpose for the near future. We address all people in all forms of team relations. We write equally for female and male readers and also think of readers who feel different. We see the diversity and appreciate the equality. We are just taking it as easy as we can with the written language.

“I am not a self-made man. I’ve always treated the world as my classroom. Never stop learning. Ever. You know that wherever you are in life, there will be times when you don’t have the answer, or drive, and you’re forced to look beyond yourself. You can admit that you can’t do it alone. I certainly can’t. No one can.”

- Arnold Schwarzenegger, from the Foreword of “Tools of Titans” by Tim Ferris, Vermillion 2016

“No living system exists on its own. It is always connected with other forms of life and can only live and develop in the midst of others.”

“People unfold their potentials through joint thinking and acting with others, through co-creation and cooperation with preferably different personalities.”

- Prof. Gerald Hüther, Co-creativity and Community, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2018, pages 66/69.

“The best and strongest drug for people is the other human being. In order to create reliable and valuable relationships there are five prerequisites:

1. To see and to be seen,

2. Joint focus on a common cause,

3. Emotional resonance,

4. Joint action and

5. Understanding of motives and intentions of each other.”

- Joachim Bauer, Principle Humanity. Why we naturally cooperate, Hoffmann und Campe 2006 [German Edition]

Who may feel being addressed now?

You lead someone who leads a team.

Leading teams is a constantly changing complex process. You support your team leader best by observing the interactions within the team as often as possible, by sharing your perceptions and by helping him protect the team especially at the interfaces.

You lead a team yourself.

You are in the midst of it. Who is in the midst, sometimes doesn’t see everything. I would like to sharpen your perception to keep you able to act effectively at all times.

You are a member of a team.

Without you the team cannot be effective. That’s why I want to make all success factors transparent to you. Cooperating doesn’t mean to wait for someone to tell you what to do. Cooperating means to take responsibility for the team process. Each member of a team must be able to lead. You, too.

You All are Equal.

Your Impact

We all want to be seen for accomplishing something meaningful. At the same time, we strive to unfold our potentials. Nobody can do this alone. We need others to connect and join forces with. We need to cooperate. Thus, we let go of being self-focused and step into the greater room of joint co-creation. Teams that collaborate like this and transfer this quality to other teams at the interfaces, create a new field of competence for the whole organization, which we call:

Transformation Competence.

The more teams collaborate on this high level of interactive quality, the more the whole organization is able to master change in most agile ways.

All of this unfolds or gets lost at the interfaces.

All depends on the power of impact and effectiveness of teams.

All starts with you.

The Weakest Link

The human brain serves the purpose to unfold their potentials. Potentials are possibilities. Humans have an unlimited abundance of possibilities at hand. They are finely tuned creatures that are emotionally and mentally elastic and can withstand a lot. They are sensitive and empathic, they can reflect themselves and others, they can transfer knowledge and experience to different contexts and fields of action and they can anticipate the effects of their actions. Through this they can achieve great things.

But there's a catch. No brain exists on its own. This sounds strange. Especially for individualists. But it's true. Brains always interact with other brains. Potentials therefore unfold through meaningful interactions of preferably different people. The more different people are, the more abundant the possibilities. People cannot not interact. They have no choice. They must cooperate. But they don't always want to. Preferably they ought to cooperate with different people. But this they like even less. At this point tensions, contradictions and sensitivities arise.

The weakest link is the transition from self-focus and personal survival mode to cocreation and optimization of the whole.

From ME to US.

Under which conditions do people like to cooperate

Looking at colleagues, your instinct probably scans them for the following criteria and behaviors [1]:

Are they competent?

Are they thinking and acting jointly for the benefit of the whole or are they selfishly pursuing their own agendas and goals?

Are they reliable?

This applies for teams as well.

This sounds easy.

But it is not.

From now on complexity increases.

It’s everybody’s call to master the challenge.

Successfully cooperating you only can together.

[1] Roger C. Mayer and James H. Davis, Indiana University of Notre Dame, “An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust”.

Content

Part 1 – Thinking

01 Thinking in Properties and Relations

02 Complexity and Stress

03 The Stress-Early-Warning-Radar

04 The Daily Team Check

Part 2 – Perceiving

05 Leading Teams to Self-Organization

06 The Advanced Model of Team Phases

Stage 1 – Forming

Stage 2 – Storming

Stage 3 – Norming

Stage 4 – Managing Stress

Stage 5 – Joint Thinking

Stage 6 – Decision Making

Stage 7 – Self-Organization

Stage 8 – Transformation

07 Four Special Phases

Managing Crises

After the Crisis

Silent Running

Boring Routine

Part 3 – Transforming

08 The Inner Structure of Transformation

09 A New View on Competencies

10 Six Systemic Competencies and Six Transformation Contexts

11 Nine Types of Transformation and what People Fear

12 Iterations and “German” Thinking

13 The Surfer Guide

14 Final Words about Manager – Leader – Leadership

15 Manuel Jork

16 Dr. Stefan L. P. Wolf

PART 1 THINKING

01 Thinking in Properties and Relations

When managers look at teams, they recognize three levels.

They see individual team members and their competencies. Accordingly, they perform individual one-on-one leadership conversations. This is like coaching football players individually and then getting them on the field together at match time. Would they know how to play together? They would be brilliant individually but lose the game together.

They see how individual team members interact with each other. This creates a broader field of perception and relations between two people become visible.

Eventually they see the entire team and are able to perceive and manage complex interactions.

The first level of perception is familiar to us. We find it easy to look at individuals and to evaluate them. Like individual athletes. We focus on their performance. We activate property-oriented thinking.

The second level of perception also is familiar to us, although the interactions to be observed become more complex now. Like a tennis match. The focus is constantly changing. Our attention and focus are being challenged now. We begin to recognize relations.

The third level of perception is also not unfamiliar to us. Like a football/soccer match with 22 players. However, the focus is no longer clear. All players are in relation with each other, constantly moving and thus continuously changing the interactions and the impact of their moves and interactive forces. It is hardly possible to keep track of such dynamics. 22 interacting individuals are linked by 231 possible one-on-one relations [2]. The interactions and their effects become confusing. We are now in relational thinking processes.

Our brain is able to perform both thinking operations. Thinking in properties is easier for our brain than thinking in relations, because it requires less energy.

When our brain has a choice, it always chooses the mode that saves energy.

Relational thinking costs more energy and is instinctively deferred.

The result:

We do not fully recognize interactive dynamics in teams or recognize them too late and therefore cannot respond to them appropriately, or we simply miss out on influencing these interactions at early stages, thus creating confusing dynamics that may be challenging to re-set at a later point in time.

We owe these insights into thinking operations to Karl Josef Klauer [3]. He designed the following diagram:

Test Yourself

1. Thinking in Properties, Similarities and Differences

Continue the series.

These are relatively easy intelligence test tasks that you could certainly solve quickly and correctly. Property-orientend thinking. C and D are the correct answers.

2. Relational Thinking

You get to the kitchen and find the following ingredients:

Wheat flour

Baking powder

Low-fat curd cheese

Water

Oil

Salt and pepper

Sugar

Leek

Zucchini

Olive oil

Cherry tomatoes

Thyme

Eggs

Crème fraîche

Milk