Today businesses must keep up with the rapid pace of change if they want to survive. If they want to stay competitive, however, they must get ahead of that change curve. Companies must adapt to change by finding new ways of working for which there are no blueprints.
Everything in business today happens through a “team” or group. It must. The complexity of business challenge is too great for any single individual to think through on one’s own. However, not all teams are created equal. So when working with teams remember these four points to help realise their potential.
1. The team’s decision is more accurate than your decision.
In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki explains how team decisions are more accurate than any single decision made by an individual. When there’s differences of opinion within a team, members don’t typically ask dissenters to change their opinions. Instead, the team is forced to work through the problem, thereby discovering new solutions previously unforeseen.
2. Team potential depends upon the leader’s maturity.
Often teams don’t realise their potential because leaders aren’t sure how to do so; they’re unaware of what it means to be a team or how to adapt their leadership style. Leaders fall into one of two roles within a team. They fill a top-down role where they delegate, instruct and outline rules and boundaries, or, they fill a peer role where they work side-by-side with fellow team members. This role change requires a mental shift that isn’t easy for leaders slowing team development.
3. What’s not said is just as important as what is.
The challenge for many teams and the leaders who run them is not just managing the social dynamics, but being aware of them. Running a meeting, for example, demands an enormous amount of focus and attention to the content at hand, and trying to process the emotions exchanged throughout the group is often too much for any single person. The agendas are not followed, egos get in the way, side conversations create new agendas and all of a sudden nothing gets accomplished. What’s needed is a third party to observe these trends and drive the team back to its stated goal; to raise the individual and collective awareness of the team.
4. The message sent isn’t always the message received.
Did you ever play (and fail!) the game of telephone at primary school where you simply listened to the message passed and relayed that message to the next person. The reason playing telephone fails is because we inject our own interpretations into the process. That is, we interpret a message based on what we think it should mean and then pass that message as the original. Unfortunately, the same phenomenon occurs in business everyday. We assume that the message sent over email will be the message received but without precise language, that message falls prey to interpretation which leads to duplicative efforts, excess costs and wasted time. Now, scale this to a team where members may geographically dispersed and you understand why organisational chaos exists. Teams require consistent communication and clarity to get ahead. Without clarity, it’s easy for members to play the blame game and without communication, the ball gets dropped.
