I met someone this evening who asked me about my work with teams.  She said ‘it sounds great, but does it really work?’

To me, developing a team is just like developing any other relationship: it’s not always easy and you have to work at it.  Most of us work hard at our friendships, marriages or partnerships, and we don’t expect them to run smoothly all the time.  We may even get help to improve them at times.

Often, just defining the team’s purpose, or mission, can take a long time, and yet in many cases the team has already been together for weeks or months, maybe even longer!  The difficulty teams encounter in defining their purpose is often the first sign that the individual members have very different views and expectations of why the team exists.  Aligning these views is one of the keys to high team performance.

Building relationships is another step on the way to high performance.  A well-structured team will consist of people with different skills, knowledge and styles, yet it may well be these very differences that create destructive conflict between team members.  Some profiling tools, such as Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) or FIRO-B, can help greatly by providing an objective interpretation of each team member’s personal behavioural style.  Understanding themselves and one another helps team members to recognise and value the differences between them, and hence build strong, interdependent relationships.

Regular planning and review are also key.  Many teams start with an offsite/away-day/kick-off - call it what you will – and make great plans for becoming highly effective, then immediately get stuck into action on their task, or project.  When they get together to review their progress they do so by looking at their achievement of tasks, rather than their development as a team.  This tends to be because tracking progress against key milestones or deliverables is clearly measurable, whereas measuring team effectiveness feels a bit more difficult, less quantifiable.  Yet if a clear purpose and measurables have been defined it is easy to track the team’s progress against them.  Strong, trusting relationships support blame-free discussions about why a team may not be doing as well as it could be, and constructive conflict is welcomed as a natural part of effective team development.

The bottom line: it can be messy, uncomfortable and tiring, but does team development really contribute to organisational performance?  Absolutely.