Is Your Team a Real Team?
Do you lead a team that doesn’t have the necessary level of accountability or collaboration to get the results your organization needs? Before you try to motivate your team, train them, or look for new talent, consider whether you have contributed to your problem: You may not be leading a real team.
By “real team,” I don’t mean a high performing team; I mean that you have structured the group of individuals who report directly to you meet certain conditions1.
The team has a team task.
In a real team, the work is designed so that team members are accomplishing a team task, not a set of individual or related tasks. A team task can be achieved only if members collaborate directly with each other. It’s not that the outcome is better if they collaborate; it’s that the design of the work requires collaboration because members are interdependent around the task. This is true whether the task is making decisions, making something (a service or product), or selling something.
Many so-called teams don’t have genuine team work to accomplish, and therefore aren’t a real team. For example, consider a VP of sales who has an annual sales goal. A group of sales directors that report to her each have responsibility for meeting a portion of the VP’s goal, and can meet that individual goal without requiring input from the other directors. A sales director can meet his or her individual goal, even if other directors do not meet theirs. This sales team is not a real team because meeting sales goals is not a team task; it doesn’t require that the VP and directors be collectively responsible and collectively accountable for whether and how all the sales goals are met – their own individual goals as well as others’.
Teamwork is not how well members work together; it is how the work itself is designed. You can’t have a team if there is not team work to be done.
People know who is on the team and who is not.
If team members are going to hold the collective team responsible and accountable, then they need to know who is on the team and who is not. We have worked with executives who could not tell us exactly who was on the leadership team they led. Usually, there was a core set of direct reports, who everyone knew was a member, and other individuals, whose membership in the team was not clear to them or to the rest of the team. Often this was because the leader had some unresolved concerns about these individuals. As a result, there wasn’t a team to perform as a team.
The team has clearly identified authority.
If a team is going to be jointly responsible and accountable, it needs to know what it is and is not responsible and accountable for. The leader needs to be clear about this otherwise the team may spend time on tasks that are outside its authority or not take initiative on tasks for which it is responsible. A real team knows not only who’s in and out, but also what’s in and out.
Ultimately, the structure of a team stems from the leader’s mindset. When a leader structures his or her team in a way that requires members’ collaboration and joint accountability to achieve tasks, the leader is thinking systemically about how the team creates results. Your mindset leads to behavior which leads to results. If your team isn’t a real team – and if it needs to be – what in your thinking is keeping you from creating the real team you need?
Originally published December 2010
1. These conditions come from the work of J. Richard Hackman, who I consider one of the best researchers on the subject of effective teams.
