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How important is a team?

A team is an interesting thing. One study published by Statista found that a massive 89% of respondents believe that teamwork between departments and other business units is either important or very important to their overall job satisfaction (I'd love to meet the 11% who didn't see it as important). What’s more, a Fierce Inc. report showed that 86% of respondents blame a lack of workplace collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures, while 97% believe a lack of alignment within a team impacts tasks or project outcomes.   Even Gallup, an organization that measures global engagement focuses on the increasing importance of team work and peer relationships in the factors they measure. Executive and senior leader teams are even more critical.  A study by McKinsey showed that only 20% of executives believe their team is high performing. And yet, we still spend surprisingly little time on team development.   We put people together, call them a team and assume they will be high performing.  But great teams don't make themselves.   There are too many factors inherent in how our brains function that can get in the way.   We all start out as a working group; a set of individuals who are grouped together.   Whether or not we become a team, and certainly a high performing one, is dependent on a range of factors.

Getting to High Performing

At ethree, we do a considerable amount of work with team development.  Over the years, we have developed our 'strong teams' framework that identifies the factors that have to be in place to support teams getting to high performance and we have a process to help you do it.   There are a number of levers to pull, but there are some consistent factors that we see repeatedly that may be helpful to call out.

1. Don't assume cultural fit means team fit.

There's a little bit of backlash to the term 'cultural fit' at the moment (more on that in a later post!), but the premise of cultural fit is still sound.  You want to hire people who align with the values of your organization (not clones).  But if you are getting diversity right (which is important because diverse teams produce better results) then alignment with the corporate values does not necessarily mean your team will gel.   There are lots of factors that shape a person, having similar corporate values and alignment will help, but other things may get in the way of collaboration.  Solution:  your team needs a clear purpose to why it exists (separate to the organizational mission) to help galvanize action and establish common ground.  This is not a panacea, but it's the start point for high performance.  If members think they are there to do different things then alignment will be exceedingly difficult.    This is more detailed than you might think, so make sure you go beyond the high level statements of 'leading the organization' or 'delivering this project' to what we are and what we are not.

2.  Build beyond 'Hub and Spoke'

Often when teams are formed, members have strong relationships to the leader (especially if they hired them) but not necessarily to each other.  In those circumstances we can get a 'hub and spoke' team (visualize a bicycle wheel) where the strength of relationships (spoke) is between the member and the leader (hub) but the inter relationships don't exist or are weak.   A strong team has equally strong connections between all members, but these rarely make themselves. Solution:   Build members understanding and trust in one another.  This might include exploring personality types, working styles, personal values  and so on, or something as simple as the leader calling out the strengths of each team member more overtly through recognition and appreciation so the team start to realize what makes each other great.    The more intentional you are about this, the faster strong relationships will form.

3.  Storming is normal but you can't stay there

I have worked with some teams who thought they were high performing because they hadn't actually made it out of forming stage.  (If you're not familiar with Bruce Tuckman's development model from the 1960s check it out.  It still works.).    In essence, the team was 'comfortable' because they weren't collaborating or challenging each other and everyone was doing their own thing.  The members thought that, because there was no conflict, they were high performing.  In fact, they were still a working group.    If teams want to get to high performing there is some storming that goes on.   It might not be much, or for long if you're lucky, but there is always some jostling when you ask folks to work together.  No jostling, no team. Solution:   Talk about team development and the stages of the team with the team.  Treat storming moments as great learning opportunities to build the team better.  Every great team has time when they talk about how the team is doing (not the strategy, operational plan or task delivery) and how to be more effective.  Build that into your agenda together.

4.  Resistance and Conflict is not futile

Given storming is a stage, expect it, and plan to make it useful.    The world is full of conflict right now.  Even Harvard Business Review's latest issue is called 'The Conflict Intelligent Leader'.   Teams are no exception.  You will have conflict, you just want it to be the productive kind.   Unfortunately not everyone learns the skills of productive conflict.  Everyone will have ideas about what collaboration looks like and how you're supposed to work together which may or may not be aligned. Solution:   Set up ground rules for team interaction (we call this contracting) and teach the team productive conflict skills .  That way when they do disagree, (which they should) it's over the right things and in a helpful way.

5.  Reward and Celebrate collaboration

Many performance management processes and reward systems are designed to reward individual performance.  While corporate senior bonuses are often linked to company performance, there isn't always a direct focus on rewarding collaboration and so individual performance (and the competing agendas that can go hand in hand with that) can become the priority.     Solution:  What gets rewarded gets repeated.    Make sure you have both mechanisms to reward collaboration and time to celebrate collective wins as a team.  This doesn't need to be budget busting, but align it with the style of your team for maximum results.

6.  Not everything can be delegated

We have seen situations over the years where the leader was 'leaving the team to figure it out' (or variations on that theme) only to have unhelpful situations drag on to the point of becoming habit or a distraction to the real work of the team. Solution: If you're the team leader, you need to help build the team by choosing different actions at different stages. If no-one else is putting the elephant on the table , then you need to.  Yes, we believe in the importance of democratic leadership in the mix of leadership styles, of coaching the team to resolve issues, of trusting your team and not micro managing,  but if it's not working, then you need to lead the team, supportively call out unhelpful behaviour and provide high quality feedback.

In a nutshell:

Those are just 6 things that we regularly see as barriers to team progress.   There are, however, as many factors as there are teams!     The important thing is to be intentional about development and not to ignore that it requires time and energy . The early you start, the faster you can get to high performing and, if you set a team up well, even if someone leaves and someone else joins, you can get back to high performing again faster. If you'd like more help with building a strong team,  workshop sessions in productive conflict or access to our resources, get in touch with us at contact@ethree.ca.  

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