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Team Problems? Go Back to Fundamentals

Posted on 08/03/2011 at 08:00 am

Great athletes, musicians, martial artists, business people, and other high performers know that you must master the fundamentals to achieve high performance.

Unfortunately, when faced with poor team performance many well-meaning leaders do not target the fundamentals.  Instead, they try using band-aid activities such as pep talks, “morale building” activities, and various management fads.

Even though these band-aid activities can temporarily boost morale, in the long run, they rarely work in the absence of solid team fundamentals.  And sometimes, despite good intentions, they actually backfire.

Why?

In our experience, about 80% percent of team work problems are caused by an issue with one of the four team fundamentals – goals, roles, processes, and interpersonal operating agreements.            
                                   

Problems in these core areas often have clear surface symptoms (that then often receive band-aid solutions). For example, teams without clear goals often appear unengaged and unaligned. Lack of clear roles may appear as a “personality problem,” as employees inevitably step on each other’s turf (which was never clearly designated in the first place). Process problems can manifest as burnout as employees each follow their own process, work against each other, or bog the group down in over-collaboration. Unclear interpersonal operating agreements can lead to a host of problems – poor morale, inefficiency, personality conflicts, and many others. In the short, teams face a variety of manifesting symptoms, yet many are actually caused by a fundamental structural issue on the team.

Unfortunately, band-aids can't fix a broken bone and only working on the symptoms will not repair the underlying issues on a team.  In fact, when employees know the team fundamentals do not work and are faced with real work challenges each day, they often meet band-aid motivation/empowerment/morale building initiatives with skepticism, annoyance, and resignation.

So, to get back to fundamentals and to check out your team’s structural foundation, ask yourself the following questions. Then ask yourself if your team members know the answer. (Hint: Subtract about 40% from your confidence level that your team knows the answers.)

• GOALS:  What’s your team’s target? How will you know you’re successful? What’s the reward? Without a clear target, even the best teams can flounder. Clear goals are the single most important factor driving team high performance.

• ROLES:  Who will do what? Where does one person’s role end and the next begin? How will you deal with natural conflicts and checks and balances between roles? Are roles aligned with each employee's strengths?

• PROCESSES:  Are your major business processes clear? Are they efficient? How do you handle items outside of your normal processes?

• INTERPERSONAL OPERATING AGREEMENTS:  This sounds fancy, but all it really means is the team has agreed upon certain behaviors. How will you make decisions? Deal with conflict? Give each other feedback? Run meetings? Manage email, voice mail, and other communications? How will you deal with others outside of your team - i.e. can you disagree in front of customers or authority figures?

If your team doesn’t have clear agreements in each of these areas, then get together and create them.  Go through each of these areas, establish clear agreements, and capture these agreements in a Team Charter. Revisit these agreements frequently to make sure team members live them.

With the four foundational pillars in place teams can quickly reach new levels of performance.  Without the guidelines and fundamentals in place, team members will bump heads and trip over themselves over and over again in a downward spiral. (In our New Team Development sessions, one of the first things we do is actually walk new teams through these four fundamentals to prevent pain down the road.)

So, to conclude, first get the team fundamentals clearly established. It’s just like a house – you need a solid foundation.

Then, with a solid foundation in place, you can access higher levels of team performance and employ more advanced approaches to take your team from good to great.  We’ll take a look at some of these approaches in a future post....stay tuned!

- Adam Chalker, Senior Consultant

Tags: Leadership Development