Reason 1
- tom12973
- Nov 24, 2015
- 3 min read
THEY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY’RE DOING
This is the number one reason why a team does not work! Ask the members of any team from boardroom teams to bathroom teams, “What is this team supposed to be doing?” and observe the puzzled looks. If your team cannot consistently answer this question it is doomed to failure. And if you are a member of such a team you are doomed to experience the torture of participating in this failure. Most teams THINK they know what they’re supposed to be doing. However, a painful number who think they know, really don’t.
Try this at your next team meeting. Give everyone two minutes at the start of the meeting to write down their answer to the question: What is this team supposed to be doing? No talking allowed. If you end up with more than two different responses your team is in trouble. So either stop whatever you are doing and find one answer to the question or disband the team since it can’t possibly do anything of value until the question is answered. Unless you can agree on what the team is supposed to be doing you are wasting everyone’s valuable time.
By the way, if you are part of an organization where some people tell others what to do (the official term is hierarchy) then 98% of the teams should be told what they are supposed to be doing by someone up the ladder. This saves a lot of time, is consistent with how things work anyway and most teams are very happy to get the direction. Don’t let anyone tell you this will decrease ‘engagement’ or some other such term; it won’t. Teams want to be successful, and knowing what they are supposed to be doing is the first step in that success, regardless how that knowledge comes about. So if your team doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be doing, try asking the boss. If the boss doesn’t know, disband the team quickly because you’ve got bigger problems to deal with!
If you are one of those few teams that is expected to figure out what it’s supposed to be doing without direction from above, then do this task well. The key ingredient to finding the answer is honesty, and there is a really good chance you will need some objective help in being honest. You also need to test your behavior against what you say you should be doing. By testing behavior you can discover if your team is just TALKING about doing something but really DOING something else. Talk is cheap; activity tells the real story.
If you are puzzled about what testing behavior means or how to do it, don’t get all complicated here. Start by looking at the measures your team uses to assess success. If they are not measuring what you have said is important you have a problem. It was your behavior that created those measures or your behavior that neglected to change them.
The next post will be suggestions about trying to deal with this reason to hate work teams. Use it to jot down some of your thoughts about your team, note any questions that might need answering, any ideas that you think might help your team be more effective. Bring these to your next meeting and continue to push for discussion on these topics. Who knows, it might help your team take a big step forward.
Discussion and comment points for this post:
Have you ever been on a team like this? Describe the experience
Have you ever worked with a team with this reason to hate it? What did you do?
It is often expressed that getting the boss to tell the team what it should be doing isn’t a good thing to do, other than at a high level. Do you agree? What assumptions might be driving this perspective?
Have you found measurements often are at odds with what a team says is important? Why do you think this is so?
And of course, any other musings you may have!
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