Word Disciplined Avoidance Of Accountability

Assignment 1: Discussion

According to the authors of the text, avoidance of accountability is one of the major team dysfunctions. Especially in larger organizations, there exist a number of interrelated variables in relationship to any essential outcome. Therefore, there always appears to be an excuse or another person or group to blame for failure in reaching a key organizational outcome. In this assignment, you will discuss an experience you’ve had with a working team or group and how this avoidance of accountability caused major team dysfunction.

Based on your research and experience, in a minimum of 400 words, respond to the following points:

Tasks:

• Based on an experience you’ve had with a working team or group, how has the avoidance of accountability factor impacted the team and its effectiveness?
• What impact did this have on the work and goals of the team?
• Identify how this avoidance of accountability was overcome by actions taken by a leader or the group or both in developing new levels of accountability. If new levels of accountability were never developed, please describe the steps the team and/or the team leadership could have taken to build accountability and resolve this essential challenge.

Submission Details:

By the due date assigned, post your response to the appropriate Discussion Area. Through the end of the module, review and comment on at least two peers’ responses.

Write your initial response in 300–500 words. Your response should be thorough and address all components of the discussion question in detail, include citations of all sources, where needed, according to the APA Style, and demonstrate accurate spelling, grammar, and punctuation

Do the following when responding to your peers:

• Read your peers’ answers.
• Provide substantive comments by
  • contributing new, relevant information from course readings, Web sites, or other sources;
  • building on the remarks or questions of others; or
  • sharing practical examples of key concepts from your professional or personal experiences
• Respond to feedback on your posting and provide feedback to other students on their ideas.
• Make sure your writing
  • is clear, concise, and organized;
  • demonstrates ethical scholarship in accurate representation and attribution of sources; and
  • displays accurate spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

• Module 4 Overview

  

  Team building is a major challenge. Working in a functional team can be extremely satisfying because people identify their common goals and work toward them. A dysfunctional team is easily identified and working in it can be utterly frustrating for the team members. In this module, you will recognize five reasons—absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to organizational outcomes or results—that lead to a dysfunctional team as identified by Patrick Lencioni (2002).In this module, you will also explore strategies to overcome the dysfunctions. You will delve deeper into specific issues such as developing trust, embracing healthy conflict, developing high levels of commitment, increasing accountability, and reviewing results consistently. Resolving dysfunction must occur as quickly as possible is essential to maintaining a cohesive team as it is the cohesiveness that assists in developing team synergy and effectiveness.The leader will have to implement effective intervention strategies to assist the team in overcoming obstacles. In some cases, the leader may need to restructure the team in order to enhance team togetherness and team productivity. The leader needs to provide strategies that will have a dramatic impact on team productivity and effectiveness.Lencioni, P. M. (2002). The five dysfunctions of a team: A leadership fable. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

  Team Development Challenges

  There are many challenges a team may face during development. As a team leader, it is essential that you recognize and understand these challenges, and develop strategies and find solutions to meet some of these challenges.

  • Diagnose the problem—This is essential in developing a solid operating team. It is required to identify the type of intervention that might be required. Diagnosing the team helps to identify and understand some of the team’s strengths, weaknesses, and key issues that can undermine team performance. It can help you to identify some of the team problems, which can assist in maintaining harmony and compatibility. Diagnosing the problem can assist in enabling you to identify shortcomings in the team’s development and structure. It can be very helpful in assisting you to identify skills and required skills in order to become a more effective unit.
  • Design a solution—The most effective method to design a solution is through collaboration. The expertise of the different team members and their strengths/weaknesses will assist the team leader in being able to come up with the most effective solutions that the team is best able to accomplish. Collaboration is essential, especially in designing the most feasible solutions.
  • Follow-up and evaluate—This is always a component that has to be implemented to ensure that all implementations and changes are successful. A follow-up meeting can be essential as it allows for the complexities of team dynamics to come to the forefront, which will enable the discussion of strategies and innovative activities for possible solutions.
  • Choose an appropriate model—Make sure the model will assist the team in bonding relationships among team members and prioritizing growth opportunities. It is important to strengthen the bonding between team members because trust is one of the major factors that can cause team problems to occur. There are numerous instruments to use for team evaluation to help team performance and growth, and it is worthwhile for leaders to explore which of these instruments would be most beneficial to fostering team development and cohesion.

  Refer the following link to learn more: 12 Simple Things A Leader Can Do To Build A Phenomenal Team.

• The Five Dysfunctions

  

  How will you determine if a team is dysfunctional? According to Lencioni (2002), the five factors that create a dysfunctional team are: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to organizational outcomes or results.Absence of trust: Ages ago, tribal ancestors elected leaders in their social circles as a survival mechanism. Leaders have the ability to guide followers to achieve desired outcomes. There is a sacred bond between the leader and the follower where the leader offers guidance and direction and the follower pledges support and trust. If the follower thinks the leader is not concerned about the best interests of the follower, the resulting absence of trust can demean their sacred relationship.Fear of conflict: Teams face conflict—an interesting dilemma. Unfortunately many teams mistake conflict for being discourteous. The healthiest of teams do not always get along and have their share of problems and conflicts. If you are afraid of conflict, you are afraid to grow. You may think avoiding conflict and stress is the best approach. However, if a group or team never has conflict or stress, the members are probably not accepting meaningful challenges. Conflict can often improve relationships in the long run and resolving the conflict after it has been presented allows for unprecedented growth.Lack of commitment: Often fear is the underlying factor making teams evade commitment. If a team does not commit, it cannot be made to feel incompetent after demonstrating an inability to achieve its goals. Therefore, many teams avoid committing to specific outcomes and, as a result, have no room for conflict. This attitude hampers the team’s opportunities for growth. By overcoming baseless fears and making commitments, a team is forced to grow, evolve, and improve. This improvement helps to meet various aspects of that commitment.Avoidance of accountability: Accountability and discipline are extremely positive words to achievers. The Latin root of the word “disciplined” literally means to cut. Discipline means to cut away or to separate the unimportant from that which can add value. In this situation, lack of accountability does not give the team the opportunity to cut away all that is irrelevant, wasteful, or time consuming. Strong teams embrace accountability.Inattention to organizational outcomes or results: This presents a huge challenge to teams. As a leader, if you don’t pay attention to your team’s performance, you may fail to recognize an opportunity where the efforts have actually added great value and should be repeated and studied. Conversely, your team may also feel their efforts are meeting standards when in fact they are far from it. Without measuring the results or outcomes, there is no way of knowing the level of effectiveness your group has demonstrated.These five dysfunctions provide a clear illustration of five devastatingly negative variables, which can deeply impact teams and their results.
  Lencioni, P. M. (2002). The five dysfunctions of a team: A leadership fable. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

  Strategies to Overcome the Dysfunctions

  

  Lencioni has identified strategies for overcoming the five dysfunctions of a team. Let’s look at specific issues such as developing trust, embracing healthy conflict, developing high levels of commitment, increasing accountability, and reviewing results consistently.Developing trust: Developing trust is similar to making friends. You cannot develop trust overnight or in a short period of time. You cannot rush through this process or miss any steps. Trust is developed over a period of time through a series of actions. Leaders need to consistently demonstrate authenticity, honesty, compassion, and a focused desire to meet the team’s goals and objectives. Over time, as the team begins to recognize this consistency, the trust levels between the leader and the led grow tremendously.Embracing healthy conflict: Focused and consistent conversations help to carefully present and analyze conflicts. The first step toward embracing healthy conflict begins with the realization that conflict implies an attack on ideas not people. In the middle of healthy conflict, team members must remember they should respond to an attack on their idea instead of the person. To achieve this, teams should develop mechanisms for checking one another’s perceptions. As team members take the initiative to develop and evolve their communication strategies, they acquire new opportunities to ensure intended messages are being received and perceived appropriately. It is much easier to embrace conflict when there is trust between members.Developing high levels of commitment: A team leader can use various strategies to develop high levels of commitment. When you have clarity regarding goals and purposes you can easily develop commitment. It is much easier to toil over apparently boring and arbitrary work when you know it will lead to more important overarching organizational goals.Increasing accountability: Performance increases when you feel accountable. Increasing accountability does not imply an organization should use overt or covert punitive measures. In fact, accountability should be ingrained so as to make you analyze the gap between your accomplishments and intentions. Accountability should remind you to attain the highest standards.Reviewing results: Constantly examining data from a number of perspectives allows you to evaluate your team’s performance at the deepest level. For example, a team can analyze its performance over the past year or discuss reasons for improvements in one academic quarter. The opportunities for measurement go on and on. However, many organizations are data rich and analysis poor. Although data is available, impartial analysis is missing. Organizations must learn reflection is necessary to make the results meaningful and to take the learning to a higher level.

  Module 4 Summary

  Through this module’s online lectures and assigned readings, you examined the challenges of building a team. You looked at various factors, which contribute to a dysfunctional team and discussed strategies to overcome them. Handling challenges and executing various strategies can be difficult for every team leader. However, an overview of various strategies certainly provides a clear blueprint of action for any leader in his or her attempt to avoid the debilitating dysfunctions.Here are the key points you covered in this module:

  • Several factors can create a dysfunctional team. The destructive power of absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to organizational outcomes or results can have devastating consequences on teamwork.
  • There are various strategies to overcome team dysfunctions. A leader must take steps to build trust, embrace healthy conflict, support high levels of commitment, increase accountability, and review essential organizational outcomes or results consistently.