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High Performance Teams: HtMTW Defines the Future of Work |
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HIGH PERFORMANCE TEAMS… ...HIGH PERFORMANCE RESULTS! |
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HPWTs: Being the Best |
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HIGH PERFORMANCE WORK TEAM CONSULTING, LLC |
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(from Praeger Press, December, 2004)
For 25 years Marc Hanlan asked himself why only a tiny fraction of U.S. manufacturing and service teams achieved breakthrough performance results. Why do some organizations achieve 50% improvements in productivity and employee commitment while others struggle to make any improvement at all? How can the U.S. become competitive again in the global marketplace?
His discovery – that breakthrough performance in productivity, innovation and shareholder value is directly linked to team think and team identity -- allowed him to codify the breakthroughs and failures of literally hundreds of business teams in a stunning new collection of insights.
That collection, High Performance Teams: How to Make Them Work, is now available through Praeger Publishers (Greenwood Publishing Group).
“High Performance teams and organizations are unique – they achieve 50% improvement in customer value, operations value, shareholder value, and employee value, in less than a year,” said Hanlan, currently a senior partner in High Performance Work Team Consulting (West Chester, PA) and a former senior operations manager at General Electric and PECO Energy.
“Although there are many teams achieving more than 50 percent improvements in a single success dimension in less than a year, the critical difference in High Performance Teams is that they make orders of magnitude improvements in all four dimensions simultaneously,” Hanlan says.
The focus of such teams is a unique mindset. It is team thinking as a single animal, a subtle shift in organizational culture – but not in the traditional sense. While conventional corporate culture defines a set of rules, values and beliefs for employees, in HPT, culture is focused on the underlying sense of group identity that creates and sometimes breaks those rules, laws, and beliefs to achieve amazing results, Hanlan contends. Group identity is wed to a fulfillment of individual identity and needs. “But it is the strength of the common identity that forges breakthrough improvements in common products or outputs,” according to Hanlan.
The results of high performance teams can be remarkable. For example:
- At a computer manufacturing division, productivity improved 60% and overhead reduced by more than 40%; - At a Fortune 500 company, Accounts Receivable cash flows in a problem billing area were increased by $4 million, and on-time billing performance was increased to 99.7%; - In a distribution organization, employee commitment was increased from a 1-percentile national ranking to 48th percentile.
“The future of American work is the high performance team,” Hanlan remarks. “Breakthroughs can be applied to existing teams, and managers can follow a series of steps to achieve leaps of productivity in a short period of time. Moreover, CEOs and line managers can learn the secrets of high performance culture by empowering teams to do their best work.”
High Performance Teams: How to Make Them Work shows the way.
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Author and consultant Marc Hanlan has guided High Performance Teams for more than 25 years from a range of positions, including line management at General Electric, support management at Exelon, and consulting for major consulting firms. Holding patents in process technologies, he is adjunct faculty for graduate programs in psychology, and currently advises, consults and presents on the topic throughout North America and Europe.
For further information, book review copies, excerpts, and author interviews, please contact Arielle Emmett of Arielle Emmett & Associates at 610-742 9319. Email: arielleem@comcast.net
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