Turning a group of individuals into a team
Five years ago I stumbled across something I should have picked up on long before. It happened when I was brought in to help solve some challenges within a senior leadership team. The remit was to assist them with understanding what drives high performance within a team, and support them in deploying the appropriate behaviours, processes, tricks and tools on the ground.
They were a newly formed senior leadership team. And this prompted me to ask the question I should have been asking all such clients: why are you a team?
This might seem like a stupid question. Well we’re the senior leadership team, that’s why we’re a team. But to their credit, this team took this question as it was meant: why is this senior leadership team made up of these particular individuals, doing these particular roles? And this of course linked strongly to the even more important underlying issue - what is the purpose of the senior leadership team?
Since then, I have asked this question time and time again. And it has provoked all manner of responses. What it has clearly identified is that many senior leadership teams are the result of habit; or hangovers from the past; or the consequence of lack of critical thought. In only a very few cases has a CEO, or their SLT, been able to articulate clearly and promptly what the purpose of the SLT is, and why it is therefore made up of the relevant individuals/roles.
Go on, have a go yourself. For whatever team it is you lead, whether your senior leadership team, senior management team, or departmental team, can you answer the following: why is your team a team? What is the purpose of the team, and why does it consist of the relevant individuals/roles?
These are questions which are so often taken for granted. And this is so often to the detriment of performance.
Calling a group of individuals a team, without any effortful thought around why they are or should be a team, is setting them up to fail. Especially when this is only the first step: once you’ve turned a group of individuals into a team, there is then a whole host of elements that will impact on whether they can be a high performing team.
So what is the answer?
In advising clients in this area I turn to someone much wiser and more expert than me: Adam Grant. Wharton Professor, organisational psychologist, and bestselling author of books such as Give and Take and Think Again. Grant asserts that:
A team is a collection of people with a shared identity who collaborate to achieve a common mission. Each member makes a unique contribution.
Taking this quote, it’s possible to break the elements down into three:
a shared identity;
a common mission; and
each person making (and knowing everyone else is making) a unique contribution.
Taking each of these in turn, creating a shared identity often takes effort. Occasionally the identity will be obvious, but more often it requires more purposeful activity. Beyond naming your team, ensuring that the team has agreed core values and behaviours, their own ‘way of operating’ can really help instil this sense of shared identity. Moving then to mission, what is the purpose of the team? What is it that this particular team is trying to achieve. Clarifying this, and backing this up with clear goals, can help significantly to change the dynamics from a group of individuals into a team. Finally the unique contribution. I cannot tell you how many teams I have seen derailed because people don’t understand why a particular person is part of the team; what it is exactly that they are contributing; why they are needed. Ensuring clarity on this aspect, so that each person understands not just their own contribution, but why everyone else’s contribution is essential to the overall mission, is vital.
Don’t assume that you can create a team of people just by calling them a team. Time up front developing and instilling a shared identity, a common mission, and clarity on contribution, will set you up with a true team.
And finally
One of the things the pandemic has highlighted is the benefit of agile, cross-departmental teams. Rapidly forming teams, around problem, customer or even region have become more the norm, moving away from more functional and traditional teams. The same rules apply, and can help significantly in moving a group of individuals into being a team, especially when this needs to be done at speed.
For more on this or any aspect of leadership, with a healthy dose of mindset, sport, and I hope usefulness thrown in, do feel free to browse through all the articles in the Huddle, or get in touch with me directly on catherine@sportandbeyond.co.uk. And for those of you looking for more insight on senior leadership teams in particular, this recent HBR article is an excellent 5 minute read. https://hbr.org/2022/01/reinventing-your-leadership-team