You’re not alone! In just the past few days, every HR exec or business partner I’ve spoken with was struggling with one or more team issues. Any of these sound familiar?
- A really cohesive team is having a great time but isn’t producing results.
- A software team has been about “90% done” with a half-dozen projects for six months.
- Great individual contributors attend team meetings but don’t collaborate.
- The people working in the home office are frustrated with the remote team members.
- People are starting to leave the GUI design team because they’re fed up with the software engineering group.
Faced with a struggling team, it’s easy to blame “problem personalities” or “poor leadership” – we can always find people lacking in some way or another. But disengagement, low productivity, and conflict are often symptoms of more fundamental issues.
When triaging a troubled team, I start by assessing its design and understanding its history – how did this particular group of people come to be working together on this particular goal and what exactly is their process for working together? Here’s the checklist of what I listen for. Warning – what follows is likely to feel painfully obvious. It’s amazing how often companies overlook these basic building block, launching teams that are practically designed to underperform.
- Clear goal – Why was this team formed? What do the members of this team think they are trying to accomplish and by when?
- Clear membership and roles – Who is on the team and what is each member’s role? Does the membership include all the needed expertise to accomplish the goal? Do all the members have an active role to fill or could they be released from this team to do other work?
- Clear process – At a high level, what are the stages or phases of the work? On a day-to-day level, how do team members share information? communicate progress? make decisions?
- Access to Resources & Tools – Does the team have access to the information, expertise, software and/or hardware, and workspace they need to be effective? Putting results-oriented people in ambiguous situations without the tools to succeed fosters burnout and apathy.
- Appropriate Incentives – Does the incentive system support collaboration? An incentive system that only rewards individual accomplishment is at odds with collaboration. Many managers have been trained to think that incentives are the solution to all productivity problems, but increasing incentives without addressing the underlying collaboration structure tends to breed either bad behavior or burnout – or both!
Finally, and more importantly, do the team members agree about each of these questions? Probably not. So that can be the first intervention – getting everyone on the same page regarding where they’re going, why, and how they’re going to get there. Clarity on these issues alone can free up a lot of energy that can be directed toward the goal.
If you’re sure you’ve got the right people on the team working toward a common goal they all understand, then it’s time to apply a framework like Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team and strengths-based approaches to build the team’s collaborative capacity.
If you have a team story you’d like to share, send us a note using the form on the Contact page or email us – [email protected].
