They Think They’re Solving World Hunger When They’re Really Just Making A Suggestion For Dinner
This can be especially damaging. The team puts in all kinds of work and time to come up with wonderful solutions and implementation plans for organizational change and then finds out that all they were supposed to do was identify a few issues so someone or some other team can actually work on them. At this point team members start to hate their team. In fact they start to hate the idea of any other team that might conceivably be formed in the next decade! Sound familiar?
This is a special case of the first reason to hate work teams – They Have No Idea What They’re Doing. In this case, they have an idea what they are doing but the boundaries are not understood. The team is playing the right game but don’t know what position they are playing. This reason pops up surprisingly often in the following scenarios:
Dealing with the results of employee surveys focusing on things like engagement.
Employee ‘participation’ initiatives.
Change implementation teams and processes.
Action learning projects.
And horror of horrors; culture change initiatives!
Teams have this wonderfully annoying habit of wanting to do too much. Give them a project and they want total control from start to finish and are royally offended when organizational processes, like budgets for instance, get in the way!
Now if you’re reading this with the thought that you just wish you faced such a problem, don’t be too quick to act on those wishes.
Organizations don’t work by the annoying habit noted above so why should teams in those organization? Rarely (actually almost never) will a single person or group be able to undertake an entire project from start to finish. Yes, even executive teams! Other people or processes are required to help, to get buy in from, or to take responsibility for parts of the project or initiative. This is just the way things work. So teams need to understand not only what they should be focusing on, but also what their boundaries are, when they need to pass things on, ask for approval or just stop doing stuff.
Like reason number 1, the roll of the boss (or equivalent) is very important here, maybe even more important. So if you are unclear of the boundaries for your team the first step should be to ask the boss. Sometimes however if you go to the boss and ask, What are our boundaries here? you will get a response something like, ‘Well you figure it out and then come check with me.’ At this point the room should fill up with red flags (the boss likely won’t notice these but you should!). All of these red flags should read, ‘We need to be more specific!’ So ask a more specific question; something like, ‘Well we think we’ll need $10,000.00 to make this work’ or ‘Well we’re going to talk to your colleague in that other department to see if they’re on board’ or ‘It’s going to take us about 6 months to work this through’. This is pretty much guaranteed to initiate a more specific interaction about boundaries and that’s what you need. It’s like that response to the question “what does quality look like?’ ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’ The boss may not be clear about boundaries but when faced with something tangible, they know what they want or don’t want.
When the role of the team is reasonably defined and its boundaries reasonably understood the team can take pride in its accomplishments, whether they are large or small.
Discussion and comment points for this post:
Have you experienced this reason to hate work teams? What is your story?
What effective methods have you used for boundary setting with teams?
If you’ve experienced a team that has gone through this, what have you done to ‘recover’?
Do you find it is more common for teams to want to do more, or want to do less?
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