Too often teams fail to live up to the old adage ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’, but why is this?

Julia Payne, CEO of leadership development consultancy the Centre for High Performance Development, examines the reasons why teams don’t work and uses CHPD’s extensive research to suggest the four key steps to really effective and successful teamwork.

Proper research into teams and what makes teams successful is thin on the ground.  This has resulted in the ‘science’ of teams becoming fuzzy.  Team building initiatives have been built around activities like walking over hot coals, throwing yourself off the side of mountains and building a bridge between two chairs!  CHPD believed that proper observational research was the only way to truly understand why some teams failed, why some worked well and while a few excelled.  To this end, over a period of nine months, over 100 teams of four to six people were observed.  The results of this exercise were combined with a wealth of organisational experience to develop CHPD’s Team Tactics model for effective teamwork.

One fundamental reason why teams fail is a simple lack of reward for being a productive team member or building a team.  If the team members remain rewarded for their individual contribution, there is little chance of truly effective teamwork being achieved.

Making teams work
The first thing to understand is that you cannot ‘mandate’ teams to achieve higher performance.  In fact controlling behaviour, which is very common, has the opposite effect of arresting the team at the first stage of its development.

Instead, the approach that works is to understand the stages of team development and then help the team master the behaviours it needs at each stage to speed up the gelling of the team and so improve performance.  Before we look at team development, we must first establish the optimum environment for that team.

Setting the context and climate
There are six key requirements to setting the right context and climate for your team:
•    The team’s work must be interdependent
•    The goal of the team must be specific and shared by all; it should require a contribution from everyone in the team and its result have an effect on all
•    Team members must be empowered so they can implement the decisions they make.  Linked to this is their belief that they can make things happen and effect change.  With that belief is the knowledge of what the team’s limits are – for example, budget.
•    The size of the team must be right; five or six is optimal
•    There are specific competencies that are required by teams and these must present in at least some of the team members.  We’ll come on to what those competencies are in a moment.
•    Finally, the team members must have equal status in the team, regardless of the level of status in the organisation.  This is crucial and a failure to address this is one of the main reasons that teams often fail to realise their potential

Four stages of team development
Once the above six requirements have been met, there are four key stages to team development.  Only when you get to stage four do you see optimum team success, so it’s essential that teams are coached through all four stages.

Stage one: Openness and freedom
The team must feel free from externally imposed control and receive support for being open and honest with their thoughts, feelings and perspectives.  Team members must be ready to state any hidden agendas openly and be able to talk about ideas that conflict with the status quo.  Alongside this, they will need to accept responsibility for the consequences of expressing these true thoughts within the team.

Stage two: Cohesion, The “We” factor
Following on from stage one, in stage two, the team needs to harness this openness and freedom to free itself from and push against controls from the centre.  Done well, this stage leaves the team feeling empowered and positive.

Skilled facilitation is essential in this stage to allow open communication without argument, conflict and jealousy.  The ‘centre’ will be tempted to suppress this rebellion, but any attempt to do that will stifle the potential of the team.  Core behaviours that are required from team members at this stage are an understanding of the feelings of others; empathy.

Stage three: Idea generation
If the team gets to stage three, then it has made the major achievement of avoiding seeing things from the team members’ own personal viewpoint.  The next task is to identify the shared ideas, issues and goals that they need to work on together.  Because of the requirements of stage one and two, the team can now think as ‘we’.  There is no point in any thinking before this stage of the team being truly ‘together’.

At this stage, it is the job of the centre to continue to support and encourage interaction between team members and across teams to identify common ground.  It is the job of the team to start generating some new ideas, ideas that wouldn’t have happened without it.  A dialogue and mesh of ideas needs to be maintained to prevent the team slipping back into individual ideas.  In effect, the team learns how to align and work together.

The core behaviours required in stage three are respect for each other and a willingness to share ideas and concepts.  In this stage, the team will learn the very valuable skill of ‘conceptual flexibility’ – this involves suspending your own assumptions so you can be open to others.  

Once team ideas are being generated, it’s essential to push on to stage four.

Stage four:  Strategy and decisions
Now the team is really starting to experience the ‘whole is greater than the sum of the parts’.  Organisational performance is see as the true common goal.  In stage four the team must now perform three crucial tasks:
1.    Identify alternative cause and effect theories – they need to get past symptom thinking, for example if competition increases, then we will see our return on investment decrease, so we need to cut costs.  The objective must be to find other cause and effect models
2.    For each alternative strategy the team develops, it must identify short and long term influences and looks at the pros and cons.  Everyone should look at the positives and negatives of each course of action – without a few people being negative throughout.
3.    Finally, based on steps one and two – make your team decision!

Mastering these four straight forward steps in a modern, fast-moving business is not a ‘nice to have’ it is essential to maximise all contributions to reach the highest possible performance.

Take the case of one of the fastest growing PR and media organisations in the UK.  The CEO remarked: “I would always meet annually with my senior team to set next year’s plan and to revisit our three year strategy. It would be two long hard days with everyone fighting their corner, posturing and eventually consensus around an uninspiring plan with little real buy in.  Inevitably conversations outside of the meeting would then try to reshape things.  I would ultimately take the information from the day, do the plan myself and present it to the group wondering why we had wasted two days.  I was introduced to a process by CHPD which was so simple and practical the whole team understood it.  The next strategy session scheduled for two days took little more than half a day and produced a fantastic result that really galvanised the team.  We spent the spare day and a half relaxing as a group getting to understand each other better and it dramatically changed the performance of the group.”

In contrast we can look at the lack of success of the US Golf Ryder Cup teams over the last three years.  Each year under different leadership the European team, on paper weaker than its US opponents, has won convincingly.  The success has been analysed by academics and sports pundits alike. (See LBS Review Article October 2005 Dr A Cockerill, CHPD).  The analysis shows that team tactics rather than individual tactics won the day.  Further analysis showed the leadership adopted a team approach exactly reflecting the four steps above to achieve success.  The US team adopted a strategy based around individual performance and individual strength and weakness.  While they ‘talked team’ there was no evidence that any approach was adopted to follow any of he steps above.

The approach is practical, straightforward and works whenever teams have to come together to achieve success.

The Centre for High Performance Development (CHPD) specialises in leadership development for organisations, teams and individuals.  www.chpd.com