About Team Capital
If you have ever been on a well-formed team, it is like magic.
Everyone who has experienced this magic talks about it with nostalgia. Once you establish and maintain an environment for these well-formed teams, productivity, innovation and the excitement of success flourishes.
However, for those who have tried to produce the effect that well-formed teams can have, daunting questions remain: How do we achieve this? Why is it so hard to replicate?
A typical scenario that unfolds when we try to create teams is that we get frustrated with the lack of performance from poorly formed teams. This frustration leads us into a “boss-worker” mode — a mode of dysfunction where we start doing the thinking for the individuals involved. We then fall into the trap of telling individuals exactly what to do next.
We end up with an environment that measures individual performance over team performance, and we award those who accomplish something, ignoring the people around them who they have stepped on in their “accomplishments.”
Worse, these same performance systems perpetuate the fractured structure and poor relationships of these teams by inhibiting the natural healing mechanisms that would help these people work together. The teams lose collective intelligence, and solve complex business problems poorly or not at all.
In contrast, effective, Well-Formed Teams tend to produce more innovative results than mere individuals, and can achieve hyper-productive levels of output when given space to do their jobs. These teams then become excellent sources of insight for strategic decision making, and their success can help drive organizations to new levels of perception and action.
Team Capital is the realization that teams are valuable assets, and treating them as such is not just good behavior, it is good business.
Our Mission
To promote understanding, values, and behaviors which encourage organizations and businesses to:
- succeed by encouraging the formation of Well-Formed Teams;
- recognize when and if they have Well-Formed Teams established;
- deploy teams and leverage the empirical reality those teams encounter;
- maximize the intellectual energy of those teams on the organization’s business needs, and;
- increase their teams’ worth as an investment.
Where We’re Headed
We propose an applied pragmatic approach that re-educates individuals at all organizational levels on the subjects surrounding the topic of Well-Formed Teams. We seek to raise market awareness that organizations with Well-Formed Teams are a better investment because of their strategic use of intellectual capital.
We are doing this by establishing a group of recognized professionals who are experienced with organizations and their use of teams.
Who We Are
The Team Capital Foundation is made up of team behavior specialists who are dedicated to helping businesses realize Well-Formed Teams as a vital asset.
We do this by focused assessment to uncover roadblocks to the formation of Well-Formed Teams. We identifiy disfunctional team behaviors and recommend proven, structured approaches that tightly couple your team’s activities to business visions and goals. We are experienced change leaders who adhere to Lean and Agile principles, and can transform your organization from a wasteful, sub-optimized process shop into a lean, change-tolerant Well-Formed Team.
What We Believe — The Business Case for Team Capital
Teams must mature through levels of performance over time. This is often referred to as “storming, forming, norming, performing.” The commonly observed practice in many of today’s businesses is to re-organize teams before they ever have a chance to reach the “performing” level of effectiveness.
This is a waste of people and their value: the teams do not have a chance to learn from empirical evidence before they are torn apart. By re-organizing so quickly, or by ineffectively establishing well-formed teams, the organizations are essentially masking the empirical reality the team is uncovering, and subsequently the organization retards its ability to learn.
Instead of using empirical data for strategic decision making they end up using data based on future projections or worse what they rely on wishful thinking (”wouldn’t it be nice if…”) to determine their actions. In these environments teams are rarely left together long enough for them to mature, develop product and provide real insight.
The market is showing early signs of demanding the presence of well-formed teams as a sign that human capital is being properly used. The existence of these kinds of teams within an organization is becoming the norm for strategic competitive organizational structure.