When Team Building is Pointless

The Problem

Surely any manager investing time and money into building a team will reap benefits. After all, everyone knows that teams work together to achieve a common goal and by doing so gain a collective output that is greater than the sum of the individual parts. Well, here’s some news: developing teams can be a waste of time and money. Indeed sometimes it’s pointless.

Here’s some other news: not all teams are structured to “work together to achieve a common goal”. Of course this is the idea of teams that we are taught from an early age. It’s the model of teams used on the sports pitch. But thinking that such examples are automatically transferable to organisations is just naive. There are thousands of team-development providers and hundreds of thousands of managers and that work on the assumption that “we did it on the sports pitch, so if you do the same you’ll get the same results”. It’s just plain naïve.

The Reality

Why is it naïve? Because many, many teams in organisations don’t actually work together and it doesn’t matter what any manager or team developer thinks they ought to do, the reality is that in order to do their work, they have to work with other people outside the team, not each other. Take for example a team of sales staff. When doing their work, they aren’t working together. They work with their customers, or other people in the organisation. Or take the example of a team of product managers who each manage a different set of products. They don’t work together, they work with the people who make and deliver the product. So what’s the point in developing them to work together when they never have and never will? It’s pointless.

Making things worse

But it can get worse than that. An IT product manager I spoke to recently had been on a team development event where the whole team had to build a catapult. They didn’t do well at it at all. Their failure was used as a metaphor for why they weren’t performing as a team at work. But how can it be helpful when the metaphor is wrong – these people never work together, either when building catapults or doing product management. As a result, not only had they failed, but the given “team” solution was of no use to them. Now they were demotivated and underperforming and with nothing that could help them!

So what is the solution? Many managers end up choosing to do nothing – they are absent from their teams. But this is no better as it causes disengagement and the team will only ever be as good as its individual parts. So what’s another option?

Ways forward

Let’s start by looking at the nature of teams again. Typically people think of all teams as Inter-Dependent. This is exactly what, “working together to achieve a common goal” is all about. But the teams mentioned above are Extra-Dependent Teams where members depend on others outside the team in order to do their work. A typical characteristic of an Extra-Dependent Team is that members all do much the same sort of thing. Extra-Dependent Teams behave very differently from Inter-Dependent Teams. As a result, the way they are managed and developed needs to be different. Here are a few pointers on how to do it.

Firstly, management of Extra-Dependent Teams is often remote because everyone is out working with people in other teams. Managers therefore need to rely on one-to-one conversations, not whole-team communication as you might in an Inter-dependent Team. This factor just isn’t acknowledged when undertaking “team development”.

Secondly, because Extra-Dependent Team members work remotely, managers typically don’t see the work they are doing. Managers giving advice, support, direction or development can’t rely on knowing the answer because they don’t witness the problem. Therefore managers need to develop a strong coaching-style of leadership. This relies on the skills of not-knowing in order to draw out of people their best performance, the direction they need to take, the encouragement they need to continuously improve on their performance. Coaching is a one-to-one style of leadership very different from the whole-team leadership encouraged (rightly) in Inter-Dependent Teams.

Thirdly, getting together as an Extra-Dependent Team is a powerful and motivating process, as powerful as in an Inter-Dependent Team, but getting together has to be done for the right reasons. An Extra-Dependent Team is bonded through learning together to achieve a common practice not through working together to achieving a common goal. So team meetings need to allow team members to discuss real problems they have and learning how others in the team have overcome them. Perhaps one person has had problems with a particular piece of IT for which another team member has found a workaround. Sharing this workaround helps everyone improve. Often managers see these issues as small individual issues and instead focus on transmitting the issues more important to them. But these small issues lie at the heart of Extra-Dependent Team dynamics. By focusing on them, drawing them out and addressing them, the team learns together, bonds together and together they each get better at what they do. In effect they have achieved the synergy manager’s dream of in teams.

What do you choose? 

For managers who acknowledge that they lead an Extra-Dependent Team, these are practical and constructive steps in bonding the team together and moving it forward. For those managers who refuse to acknowledge their Extra-dependent Team and continue to dream of leading an Inter-dependent Team, then these steps will seem irrelevant. But sadly, this blinkered naivety will typically drive the team towards dysfunction and underperformance. Worse still, such blinkered managers tend to blame the team rather than themselves. Both cause major dysfunction in the team.

It’s time to take off the blinkers and see teams the way they really are, not how we wish them to be.

 

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