Your Leadership Challenge

After studying this chapter, you should be able to:

• Turn a group of individuals into a collaborative team that achieves high performance through a shared mission and collective responsibility.

• Identify challenges associated with teamwork, and explain why people sometimes have negative feelings about working in a team.

• Lead a team to high performance by providing a compelling purpose and clear objectives, clarifying roles and responsibilities, designing the team in terms of size and diversity, giving team members decision authority, and providing support and coaching.

• Understand and handle the stages of team development, and know how to promote cohesiveness and shape productive team norms.

• Understand the challenges and benefits of virtual teams and the team leader behaviors that contribute to virtual team effectiveness.

• Handle conflicts that inevitably arise among members of a team.