Introduction

A key theme in HR strategy is often that of team-building, when this can have a major impact on economic value creation in formulating and implementing a specific strategy.

Strategic team-building is defined here as meaning:

Developing a teams behavioural alignment in order to achieve acquisition improvement in its capability as a unit, its positioning in the organization, and the economic value of its outputs.

Whilst there has been ample research on team building, there has been relatively little associated with building a strategic team. What specific behaviours are at work when senior managers work together to formulate and/or implement a strategy? Again, this is an area that has been explored little at least in a systematic fashion. In this chapter we focus on the new notion of strategic behaviour , which is extremely helpful in strategic team-building.

One of the authors therefore performed extensive research into the role of strategic behaviour in team-building within a division of BT. This research (and its outputs) complements our discussions in Chapter 12 on the value of strategic thinking. For unless a team can behave strategically, it is unlikely that it will be able to think strategically very efficiently as a unit, either.

Our focus now is much more on this as a behavioural, emotional, and political topic, as opposed to being mainly a cognitive one.

Although managers know they are expected to act strategically, they frequently don t know what this entails in short, they don t know how to do it,...