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When Teams Are Not Really Teams

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When Teams Are Not Really Teams

Admired Leadership
Feb 28, 2023
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When Teams Are Not Really Teams

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Enterprises often organize people into a working group and call them a team even when the members work independently and have no overlap of tasks or outcomes. Because they are called a team, leaders naturally hold meetings with the collective, asking them to provide updates and review performance metrics that others on the team could care less about. 

Not surprisingly, these meetings are a death march and so boring that anyone not speaking checks out and disengages. The leader is left scratching their head, wondering what to do to create meaningful dialogue and collaboration. The problem is usually obvious to everyone but the leader who has been directed to provide oversight and manage this so-called team. 

Drum roll, please. 

This is not a team. And can’t be. 

The group is a loose collection of individual performers and will not operate as a team no matter what strategy the leader employs. By definition, a team is comprised of highly interdependent members with a common purpose and a shared set of outcomes. When those characteristics are absent, nothing can make members engage as a team. 

Giving the group a false purpose or common goal will often compound the problem. The same is true for inconsequential results or outcomes to bind the individuals together. Effective leaders don’t fight the fact that some groups can’t and won’t operate as a team. Instead, they foster collaboration and relationships by avoiding gatherings of the entire collective and use three-way meetings as their surrogate. 

By inviting two group members to join the leader for a periodic discussion, leaders can use the time to receive the updates they need and also to promote a stronger relationship between the peers. The key is to treat both members as co-leaders. After reviewing recent news and updates and exploring strategic issues and metrics with one member, the leader should ask the other individual to work with them to provide feedback, ask questions, and offer insights about what they heard. 

Asking each of the parties to apply their smarts and sense-making to the other creates a robust learning conversation that becomes invaluable over time. Mixing up the pairs each week adds to the benefits everyone receives.  The more group members know about each other’s projects, assignments, and results, the more they will seek each other out for advice and counsel away from the leader. 

Some groups just can’t operate as a team. Instead of forcing them to, the best leaders accept that reality and treat everyone as leaders. Sometimes unity exists in the conversation and not in a common goal. 

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When Teams Are Not Really Teams

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Dave Thompson
Writes Humor & Health
Feb 28

This is a powerful observation and accompanying wise counsel for the industry of network marketing. I've fallen prey in the past to the desire for a cohesive work unit which led me to call my downline a "team". In reality, we had some things shared - like the learning curves and difficulties encountered, but all of the incentives and daily work happened as individuals.

I believe that this advice is powerful and I'll be sharing it with leaders in this industry.

One thing we have done with some success is to create some community around the most common objectives. For example, we established a daily "personal growth" virtual meeting. For periods of time it was fueling to the individuals and we found that many drew a great deal of benefit from the structure.

Thanks again for these daily gems. I'll call out your generosity here. These blogs are highly valuable and the fact that you are sharing them freely is greatly appreciated by me and others with whom I've shared them.

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6 replies by Admired Leadership and others
Jim Salvucci
Writes On Leading With Greatness
Feb 28

This is some good and practical wisdom for making an arbitrary grouping into a real team.

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