Thursday, September 17, 2015

The Best People or the Best Team: Which is more Important

The best people are the superglue of the best team, and the best team are the effective vehicle for the best people.

The variety of research shows that the foundation of business success is innovation, but if you trace the history of innovations, were they the result of teamwork or individual genius? With the increasing speed of changes and over-complexity of business and society, do you need the best people or best team? When comes to the team, what does the team present? Is it an individual who drives the team forward, or a group of people pulling together?


Dialogues: Basically, the idea is that there are different types of dialogues. Each kind of dialogue has its context or "initial situation," the participant's goal, and the ultimate goal (or the goals of the dialogue). We dialogue when we communicate. Each type of dialogue has its use. These contexts can shift. In natural conversation, we can shift these goals and contexts. You are going to find that with a greater understanding of these different kinds of dialogue when work is suspected of being "individually assessed," personal accountability becomes a factor. This leads to that social drive for appearing valuable or influencing others to perceive you as valuable. However, this leads to a kind of argument. You are essentially persuading others that you are valuable. This again is a kind of dialogue that flips back and forth between the act of providing proof (inquiry) with persuading (where the conflict of opinion is assumed, assumed that the onlooker or evaluator requires proof that you are valuable or is of the opinion, but are you valuable to the team as well). So there are people who over-emphasize the dangers of "politically correct" speech are ignorant of culture-building, connectivity theory, dialogue theory, and the powers of diverse networks. These are also the people who find difficulty with metacognitive skills and sophisticated communication because communication is not simply message and feedback. Communication is much more complicated because there are differences in goals and contexts.


Credibility: Basically, many people who study leadership and the importance of relationships assume that credibility is one of the main factors of building good work relationships. Credibility is not the same thing as being a likable idiot. Being honest can allow for incompetence, but credibility requires competence as one of the factors that encourage where credibility emerges. It is a perceived quality that others assign to you based on the interplay of a number of elements, such as integrity, competence (expertise), sound judgment, relational sensitivity, and likeability. Likeability and Credibility are two complex qualities that emerge from a handful of factors. The scary thing is, this is true for a number of important qualities in the knowledge work fields. There are biological/genetic factors, but these factors are complemented with concepts like growth-mindset, self-efficacy, social learning theory, and human agency theories/approaches, and appreciation. Social sensitivity ( empathy) which can be measured for, conversation patterns.  


Trust: IT offers data, and human cognition is needed to interpret the data. The sheer volume of data individuals are flooded with from IT requires more cognitive abilities, not less. Invite people to consider that 'engendering trust' is a complex process in and of itself, because it requires that the individual has a level of maturity and awareness - an ability to 'see' if you will - that can lead to productive and creative group dynamics and trust, as well as sustainable business practices. The linchpin is, of course, how each person shifts from the simple trust (friend and family orientations) to authentic trust (partnership type dynamics). In other words, each person must trust themselves to think and act on account of the group to then create and sustain trust with other team members as new challenges emerge.

Appropriateness: It is a concept that recognizes the complexity of the interplay of goals, values, needs and wants with shifting contexts. The goal is to provide takeaways for businesses. The need to operationalize information can be valuable to them. However, in the end, social interactions have underpinnings, or like we often see using the iceberg model, there is more going on beneath the surface than what is seen above the surface. For example, how do you measure respect? appreciation--deep appreciation, not surface? How do you identify high-performance traits, like assertiveness, negatively affect teams? Ask yourself, from the different kinds of dialogue, which would involve the use of assertiveness? Persuasiveness would use more assertiveness than "information seeking. " Some assertiveness would be involved in Inquiry and Negotiation dialogues.


The best or the right people are the cornerstones of the best team; while the best team with complementary thinking style, skills and capability can achieve much more than any individual who performs on his or her own. Therefore, always bring in the right people, with the ultimate goals to build a high-performing team for archiving better-than-expectation result and improving overall organizational maturity.

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