Leadership & Management: To team or not to team; that is the question

With the possible exceptions of the Internet and e-commerce, not many things in business have increased in popularity more than the concept of teamwork.  I have been working with, and studying teamwork and the leadership of teams for about thirty years and I have witnessed a transformation in organizational interest in using teams to accomplish work.  Not all of this change has been for the good.

Thirty years ago, if you were talking about teamwork, everyone assumed you must be a football coach or possibly a sports psychologist.  Twenty years ago, some changes started happening.  For example, based upon a number of commercial aircraft accidents and the subsequent research conducted at NASA Ames Research Center, we found out that about two-thirds of all the accidents were caused, in large part, by the crews making errors.  Not "pilot errors" mind you-but the crew as a whole.  As a result of those investigations, the airline industry decided it was in their best interest not to continue to fly perfectly good airplanes into the ground because the crew couldn't perform well together as a team.  They began fairly intensive, if rudimentary, work into helping their crews, and particularly the leaders of their crews (the captain) develop and maintain better teamwork in the cockpit.

    This idea got a real boost in the private sector after the large scale downsizings that occurred in the late 80s and early 90s.  Senior executives realized that if they were going to continue to increase revenue and productivity with a downsized organization, they would need to think a little differently about the way they were structured, designed, and organized.  Teamwork offered an attractive alternative.

    Today, everybody seems to be talking about teamwork as if it is the panacea for all organizational woes.  And this has brought my role as a teamwork and organizational consultant around in a 180º turn.   In the 70s, only athletic coaches wanted to talk about teamwork, and they usually didn't want my help.  In the 80s, people started to consider alternatives, but getting organizational leaders to seriously consider teamwork was like asking them to volunteer for a prolonged regimen of electroshock therapy.  After a decade (the 90s) of seeing the potential benefits of teamwork if it is done right (and that's a really big "if"), teamwork is now being applied in situations where it really has no place or any likelihood of making an improvement.  Getting leaders and managers not to consider teamwork is as important as helping them do it right.

    That is how I find myself approaching organizations who are either interested in starting to use teamwork, or those who have been trying it and not having the success they anticipated.  With that concern in mind, I suggest that leaders and managers struggling with teamwork issues ask themselves three questions.

    First, is the mission, goal, or task of the potential team characterized as both common and complex?  Having a common goal is straightforward enough.  If your potential team doesn't even have a common objective, you've got problems that are more serious than teamwork.  But why complex?  Because, if it's simple, you don't want to go through the trouble of forming and supporting a team.  Let's be really clear about this.  Teamwork definitely isn't easy and teamwork isn't necessarily cheap.  Don't try teamwork because you think it'll solve all your problems or save you money.  You should only use teamwork because the problem is too complex for any one individual to resolve it and you are convinced that you want high performance output.

    Secondly, does the anticipated task require differentiated skills?  If everybody you are considering for the team has exactly the same skills, you don't want to think about a team.  Here's an example.  I think Peyton Manning is a terrific football player, arguably, the best quarterback in the league.  But if I could manage to clone him and make up a whole team of nothing but Peytons, I would lose to every other team in the NFL.  Without big linemen, lanky receivers, skilled quarterbacks, awesome backs and backers and some great kickers, I don't have a team that can win-even though it is populated by an entire fleet of MVPs.  A team is more than merely the collection of individuals who make it up and they need a variety of skills.

    Lastly, and probably most obviously, the members of the team must be interdependent upon each other for success.  This is going to rule out the "tightly knit team of 600 people."  It is impossible to imagine a team of 600 where everyone knows the capabilities and benefits of the other 599.  

    If you can answer all three of those questions affirmatively, teamwork might offer substantial benefits.

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