Taran Swan And High Performance Team

In the Taran Swan case, does Swan’s team display the characteristics of high-performance teams?  If so, describe the way in which her team resembles a high-performance team.

Taran Swan’s team displays the characteristics of high-performance teams such as trust, effective organizational culture, and the management of relationships.

According to Katzenbach and Smith (1993), “a team’s performance…calls for both individual and mutual accountability” (pg. 1).  In other words, trust between team members is essential to a team’s overall performance.  This particular trait improves communication between team members and eases the tension of teamwork Taran Swan’s delegation of work required a profound degree of trust in her employees.

Swan appointed Friedman and McCarty as co-vice-presidents of marketing.  Even though the two of them had little or no experience in marketing, Swan trusted in their own inherent talents to accomplish the marketing campaign.  Friedman said, “I kept telling Taran we needed to hire someone, but she said we were doing a fine job.  I told her I’d never done this before, but she said ‘It’s okay, you’ll figure it out.’  Taran had faith in us that we could learn to do it and work together” (pg. 8). Because of the strong belief in the individual, efficiency heightened; in the situation, they were poised to give their best and deliver excellent service that would be in the best interest of the team. It worked!

In Managing Your Team by Linda A. Hill (1994), culture is described as “an important way in which a manager can facilitate the team’s process…the basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by the team members, that operate unconsciously, and are taken-for-granted” (pg. 8).  Swan used the Nickelodeon “Grow-Downs” to initiate her employees into the corporate culture, energizing the staff about the company and its goals enabling the team to perform to the best of its ability. One salient point about building culture is that it makes the working environment ‘seriously familiar’, and staff understands this. They work hard to achieve, yet are relaxed within the favorable culture already created.

Here, one can say that there is a progression from the tension of usual business environment to that of relaxed atmosphere created by trust and a credible working culture. This promoted diversity and provided a fertile ground for creativity to thrive. The flexible working condition supports innovation that would contribute to the progress of the company, as encouraged by the administrator. It made it so easy to harness available resources for optimal productivity.

Hill goes on to say that managing relationships within the larger organization is key to a team’s success.  This means those relationships “outside their teams but inside their organizations” (pg. 4).  Swan accomplished this through her countless trips to New York and Miami to inform Nickelodeon’s corporate heads about the Latin American sector’s operations, which served to keep the senior-level executives interested and invested in the new venture. This attempt by Tara enabled other team members to learn from her exemplary step that it is important to maintain fruitful business relationship with competent allies. The importance of this cannot be overemphasized. Maintaining such ties secure the business in right shape among the league of investors and conscious clients. It provided an avenue for exchange of business idea, and the pedigree of the team grew steadily.

There are vital components of high-professional team; trust with promotes effective communication and eases the tension on interaction; understanding which improves communication and maintenance of competent ally interests and support in the interest of company: all these can be found in that noble team led by Tara Swan. It would simply be unfair to create a case to assert the absence of high-performance; even an imbecile would disagree with such a preposterous opinion!