Thoughts on Teams

Teams are popular in today’s organisations. Often generalised as: functional, cross-functional, self-managed, self-organised, virtual, troubleshooting and so on. But will any of them be an effective team?

There is a simple test comprising of the following questions we can borrow from Systems Leadership:

1. Do they have a common purpose?
2. Do they have to interact to complete their individual tasks?
3. And do those tasks achieve the common purpose?

Answering no to any of these questions, will predictably lead to effectiveness issues. Because mutual interdependency will not be present. If I am on a train with a group of other people, we share a common purpose, get to work, but we do not need each other to get there. We aren’t a team, we don’t need to collaborate for mutual benefit to get to work. We are only a group.

In an organisation its hard enough to hold a team accountable for their work, its even harder to hold a group. And I’ve seen many teams as poorly constructed groups. Because it is so hard to hold a group to account, the outcomes are often disastrous.

A reality I see is that you can only hold an individual accountable for their work. So when you have a team, it makes sense that a leader is that person we can hold to account. But, and only but, that they then have full authority over how the team works. If they have this authority then they can potentially hold each team member to account.

There are those that believe that a leader is not required. Found in the ideologies of self-managed, self-organised, organic, empowered, non-hierarchical groups. It sounds appealing to advocate freedom to choose work and be autonomous. It is appealing precisely because the alternative is the lack of freedom and autonomy. Often labeled as command and control, bureaucracy, or top down. In my experience, most perceived issues with the management of work is simply mad, bad or stupid leadership.

Many of us have had experiences of poor management and leadership. When that becomes shared it is temping and completely normal to look for the polar opposite. We start believing an idea that we don’t need leaders. This is a dangerous, because an unofficial leader will emerge anyhow.

Under times of stress, complexity, or critical decision making, the team will look to someone to carry the mental load and have the sorts of courage to make difficult decisions. It is in our social nature to discharge this anxiety through someone. If this person doesn’t exist as a clarified and authorised role, an unofficial invitation is up for grabs for someone to steer the team. This is where power rather authority comes to take grip. In some cases this might be ok, often referred to as “rising to the challenge”, but what often happens is problematic uses of power over team members, generating potentially unproductive behaviours. Before we know it infighting is so great that soon there is a team no more.

When a team is operating well the leader is actually hard to spot, not because it is “self-managed”, but because the leader has a developed set of social processing skills that consciously distributes clarity in a productive way. They are fair in holding team members accountable to a social process that maintains a productive bond. On top of this they understand their role and the limits of their authority that come with it. They have clarity of context that surrounds the team and the work they need to do. They understand their purpose and the team’s purpose.

In turn a team member can understand their role and the authority it entails. Understanding and clarifying context is a responsibility of all team members and a team leader is first and foremost a team member to help do this work in a positive manner. It is the quality of the “working” relationships between members, their level of social cohesion, that gets quality work done. Counter intuitive to many of us, it isn’t the technical processes that gets work done. People do. Quality working relationships lead to quality work done.