What's so important about managing teams? The answer is this: Teams can make a significant difference in how well the organization serves its clients, provides creative ideas, and keeps the workforce engaged toward higher performance. Under the right circumstances, employees also fulfill their drive to bond through teamwork. At the same time, managers need to recognize the conditions where teams are valuable and where they merely increase the cost of production or aggravation to everyone involved in the team.

Managing teamwork also matters because teams do not always work well without help from management. In fact, there are probably as many team failures as successes in organizations because managers sometimes wrongly assume that teams can operate effectively without management guidance and intervention. This is obviously a false assumption. As we learned in this chapter, teams thrive under the right conditions and with the right team characteristics. Companies need high-performing managers to put these potentially high-performing teams together.

Although high-performance teams can do much to manage their own processes, managers are always needed to facilitate and offer constructive feedback. For instance, members of even the highest-performance teams are sometimes reluctant to correct behavior problems of a fellow teammate; they welcome involvement from managers to assist. Similarly, managers occasionally need to step forward to point out when the team needs some intensive team building or when a simmering conflict is dragging down the team's performance and camaraderie. Thus although high-performance teams rely less on managers for day-to-day decisions, they will continue to depend on them to maintain a team-friendly work environment and help steer the team when members don't realize they are heading for shoals.