Rus Slater - Team Management

• “Do they work together and depend on each other?” (Or do they just work in the same place, each doing their own thing?)

Don’t assume you have a team until you have common agreement that this group of people is a team.

Whether you have a sales team, a customer service team, a medical team, a combat team or a soccer team, there are certain characteristics that the team will need in order to be successful both in terms of how it operates and in relation to its achievement of targets.

1There is clarity of purpose; members can and will commit themselves to the overall objectives.

2The team has a clear, explicit and mutually agreed approach: conventions, norms, expectations and rules.

3The individuals have clear performance goals against which they are measured. These may include a continuous series of milestones along the way to larger goals.

4The atmosphere tends to be informal and there are no serious tensions. It is a working atmosphere in which people are involved and interested.

one minute wonderDecide before you go any further: “Do I want these people to operate as a team with targets, or am I simply responsible for a group of people?”

5The team members listen to each other, and new ideas are openly discussed. Everyone has a say.

6People are welcome to express their feelings about different issues as well as their ideas.

7Disagreements are carefully examined and resolved rather than crushed. Dissenters are not seen as trying to dominate the group, but as having a genuine difference of opinion.

8Each individual team member is respectful of the mechanics of the group: arriving on time, coming to meetings prepared, completing agreed upon tasks on time, etc.

9Constructive feedback is welcomed, and it should be frequent, frank and relatively comfortable – oriented towards improving performance rather than allocating blame.

10Whilst a single person may have the title of Team Leader, he or she may step quietly aside to allow others to work to their strengths. The issue is not who’s in control at any particular moment, but how to get the job done.

Think about how your people will operate successfully as a team.

There are numerous reasons why some groups calling themselves a team aren’t really a team. This may not be a problem, but sometimes it is. Teambuilding with a group can be counter-productive, detracting from individual performance without any compensatory collective benefit.

A sales ‘team’ where the individuals work in competition with each other is not a real team. In this environment, the nature of competition and performance-related reward actively discourage team working in favour of an individual meritocracy. In a different example, an accounts office might contain a bought ledger ‘team’ of clerks. However, they all have the same role and so are not complementing each other’s

case studyIn the early 20th century, when the explorer Ernest Shackleton was selecting his team for the Endeavour Expedition, he expressly selected beyond technical competence in the specific functions, actively seeking people who showed personality traits that he felt would complement each other in the challenging environment that he knew was coming. Nowadays, a team manager has more objective tools at his or her disposal to help with this, such as psychometric assessments and ‘team roles’ questionnaires.

skills within the ‘team’. To recruit for either of the above examples is relatively straightforward: find people with exactly the same knowledge and skill and the job is virtually done!

A team, on the other hand, can be much more difficult to form:

• Members of a team are selected for their complementary skills, not a single commonality. A business team may consist of an accountant, three sales people, a warehouseman, a delivery driver and a secretary, for example.

• Each member of the team has an individual purpose and function relevant to the team’s overall objective. This means that there will be interdependencies between team members.

• The success of these interdependencies relies to a greater or lesser extent upon the relationships and interactions between the team members. There is usually not as much room for conflict when working as a team, or for independence. This creates challenges in selecting team members; do you select complementary personalities or people who have a lot in common?

Complementary skills and interdependencies make a real team; otherwise, ‘team’ is just a label.

There are lots of people in the world who use the title of Team Manager or Team Leader but are not genuinely doing anything to lead or manage. Sometimes this is a pure sinecure, while in other cases these people are deluding themselves.

People may be given the title of Team Manager as a sinecure (See Jargon buster) so that the organization can push them to the sidelines or a position where they can do no damage.

Sometimes this action follows the concept of the so-called ‘Peter Principle’, where a person has been promoted to a level beyond their competence. If no-one has the strength to remove them, they may be given a grand-sounding job title and marginalized. On the other hand, many organizations give sinecure job titles as a genuine way of recognizing and retaining technical talent. “We need to keep this person and give them more status, so we will call them a team leader but we don’t actually expect team management from them.”

one minute wonderAvoid becoming a team leader or manager in name only. Real team leadership is a highly active, challenging and rewarding role.

There are two types of delusional non-managers:

1 People who have always viewed a management role as a ‘privilege without responsibility’.They get the bigger salary and the executive car parking space, and believe their job will be easy because people will automatically respect their rank and status. These people can usually be spotted by their absence! When they are around they have a tendency to ‘throw their weight around’; they bluster and coerce their staff to do their bidding, which often has more to do with bolstering their own egos than with achieving any meaningful objectives.

2 People who genuinely believe they are ‘managing’ but are really getting in the way of people doing their jobs.These people can usually be spotted by their constant calls for progress reports, their insistence on holding meetings in which nothing is agreed, and their micro-management of staff in the mistaken belief that they are somehow “helping”. They regularly introduce new initiatives, but rapidly lose interest in them.

If you have ever seen the TV sitcom called ‘The Office’ (either the original British version or the US spin-off) you will recognize the delusional type described here!

Your team will soon notice if you are a delusional team manager.

If leadership is ‘the relationship between those who choose to lead and those who choose to follow’, then it is as important for a team to have followers as it is for the team to have a leader.