When authors Mike and Harvey Robbins wrote a book called “Why teams don’t work” – they weren’t saying teams “don’t” work, but highlighting the roadblocks to effective teamwork. Listed below are some of the reasons they cite for poor team performance.
Why teams don’t work . . .
- Bad/poor leadership practice(s)
- Invisible/inadequate leadership
- Bleary vision
- Uncertain boundaries
- Unresolved roles
- Mismatched needs
- Insufficient feedback and information
- Personality conflicts
- Bad decision making
- Lack of team trust
- Unwillingness to change.
- Anti-team culture
- Confused goals
- Cluttered objectives
- Bad policies
- Wrong procedures
Although this is quite a long list, we can readily categorize these problems into four realms or clusters as follows:
Team Leadership
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Team Relationships
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Team Values/beliefs
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Team Processes
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The clusters represent quite unique team building challenges.
Team Leadership problems are obviously related to the team leader, rather than to team members and make team building difficult because the leader typically needs to make the greatest change in terms of current behaviour or approaches. For team building to work, a leader either needs to start thinking in new ways ahead of time, or at least be open to make adjustments in the future. If neither of these are possible, team building efforts are likely to be sub-optimized or fail completely.
Team Relationship problems (such as personality conflicts) are often best dealt with on a private basis between the individuals concerned and not in a team building situation. However, if the relationship problems are about communication shortfalls, role clarity or mismatches between people and the roles they are being asked to do, team building can be a good way to tease out the issues and potentially identify new ways that things might be done in the future.
Team Values/Beliefs problems often stem from the leader, who may well let individuals hold very different beliefs and/or values which can lead to many problems in terms of consistency of decisions, and trust. A very “hands-off” leader may also allow a culture that is not very team-oriented or unwilling to face up to major change, when it comes along. Team building can be useful in these circumstances as it allows a leader to not only air any issues but to seek to create more values/beliefs alignment in the interests of better team efficiency and effectiveness.
Team Processes problems relate to all the policies, procedures, operating standards and systems which exist to guide the team’s efforts. If well-designed and clear to all they are rarely much of an issue. However, where this is not the case, team performance can suffer greatly and change has to occur. Team building activities can be a great way to address team process problems and challenges and start to identify better ways of doing things.
Summary
Team building challenges tend to fall into four realms or clusters. These relate to Team Leadership, Team Relationships, Team Beliefs/Values and Team Processes. Effort is therefore best invested in analysing in which cluster most problems tend to exist before designing any team building efforts.
Related Resources
Well before any attempt has been made to build a team’s skills, it is critical to understand the stages through which a typical team will travel over time. A considerable amount of research has been done on the stages of team growth. This suggests that teams go through four distinct phases: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.
This assessment (which takes around 30 minutes to complete) looks at an individual’s ability to effectively build the team using the Forming, Norming and Performing model, with seven separate categories in all:
- Vision and direction (Forming)
- Value alignment n(Forming)
- Role clarity (Storming)
- Setting ground rules (Norming)
- Monitoring systems (Norming)
- Continuous learning (Performing)
- Boundary management (Performing).
A total of 84 questions help individual team members to determine their overall competence in each of these seven areas. Note: This is a Ministry-Specific downloadable edition of this profile.
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