Great People, Great Team? Not always.

Why is it that great people, working together, don't necessarily become a great team? 

Management gurus have had a lot to say about this. I suppose Jim Collins would say they aren't in the right seat on the bus. Marshall Goldsmith might say it's because they each keep trying to make the other people on the team change. Patrick Lencioni suggests that the core problem of a dysfunctional team is lack of trust.

While there's certainly truth in what they say, I just don't think they offer much of a practical solution to the problem. Frankly, many team leaders just don't have the training, insights or finesse (let alone, the time or patience) to be able to do much to fix these things.

It's tough enough to manage a team when everyone is physically together or working for the same company. Who has the luxury of that? No longer the exclusive domain of traveling salesmen, regularly working from home or another off-site location at least one day a week has become the norm. Between outsourcing and the use of independent contractors, teams often consist of people whose paychecks are from different employers.

Leading a diverse team consisting of people from different divisions (or the five boroughs of New York) can be quite the cultural and language challenge. Global teaming can be exponentially more complex. No longer a problem to be faced largely by large multinationals, today, even the smallest company can easily go global.

Even if we didn't have time, distance and boundaries to conquer, there's still the issue of human frailty. We're not perfect. We come to the team with different capabilities and agendas, baggage and personalities.

So how can great people become a great team?

I believe the answer is clarity. Specifically, clarity on nine specific dimensions, without which teams get stymied, off-track and disrupted:

1. Clarity of purpose, or reason for everyone to give it the time and energy they would otherwise devote to something else.
2. Clarity of organizational support, or endorsement by the folks that matter and backed by resources.
3. Clarity of role, not just understanding what's expected of each member, but also gaining their buy-in.
4. Clarity of process, or how the team will function to get things done.
5. Clarity of decision making, or how the team will disagree, resolve conflict and eliminate roadblocks so it can move forward with a single voice (even if individuals don't think every decision is best.)
6. Clarity of interpersonal relationships, or what team members both need and are expected to do in order to demonstrate respect for one another.
7. Clarity of planning so that everyone knows who, what, where and when things need to get done.
8. Clarity of measures so that everyone can mark progress and direction.
9. Clarity of shared accountability so that the entire team shares the glory, the bonus or the disappointment.

Clarity can be most elusive.

We can start out thinking we mean the same thing. Even when we use the same words, in the same language, our mental models of those things can be different. We don't find out until quite farther down the road that we didn't mean the same thing at all. A great example is the word, "project," which clearly means something very different to an accountant, a marketer or an engineer.

We can agree, for example, on the goals or strategy of a particular team activity. But, as the project evolves over time, we can see a situation that was quite clear several months earlier very differently. Circumstances change. More information becomes known. Priorities change.

And then there's decision making. Any team that fails to answer early on, "who decides" is bound for trouble. It would be fantastic to also know "how are we going to decide"  - but if I can only have one, give me "who" over "how" any day.

Teams are uncomfortable talking about the decision making process. Decision making gets tied up with emotions around power, comfort with disagreement and dealing with conflict. Teams that can look at decision making as problem solving will find it a whole lot easier and less personal.

Often you'll hear a team say the group just doesn't get along. People describe in detail who said or did what to whom. As grown ups we all know we don't have to become best friends with the people we work with. Some may say there are good reasons not to. But the team can and should insist on professional respect within the team. There are so many influences on how we define respect as we grow up. Just ask the question, "Is respect is something everyone deserves (but could be lost) or whether it is something that must be earned?" and you'll see what I mean.

When people complain about their team not working well together, you'd be surprised how often it boils down to lack of clarity.

By back-tracking, starting with the purpose and moving through each of the nine dimensions listed above, you'll find out exactly where the breakdown in communication occurred. As real clarity - shared understanding using the same words, shared meaning and effect, and shared agreement - is achieved, great people can indeed become great teams.