With Ivan Hollingsworth, Founder of Centric Consultants
When is a team, not a team?
While it might sound like the start of a bad joke, one of the reasons that you may be struggling to create a thriving team is that you might not actually have a team at all. It’s important to consider if you are a team or a group of people who are simply working on the same projects or spending time in a shared environment (which is ok, we just need to call it what it is and act accordingly). A real team is a small group of people with complementary skills who are committed to a shared purpose, who succeed or fail together, and who hold one another accountable.
Teams need to exist for a specific reason and to build a thriving one, sometimes we have to go back to the drawing board and look at whether we have the foundations in place and whether a team approach is, in fact, the correct one. Real times have high levels of interdependency and embrace uncertainty together, whereas working groups exist to share information, perspectives and best practices, but are not reliant on each other as a collective. Both ways of working have their place, but be careful you don’t fall into the trap of creating a ‘pseudo team’, where you claim to be a team, but lack the emotional commitment and shared purpose of a real team and without the efficient processes and individual responsibility of a working group. These complications are often the result of hybrid or remote working which are complicating an already tricky issue by placing us physically apart from each other, or where leaders think everything must be a ‘team’, so manufacture them. The risk in creating a team, when none of the key elements exist, is it leads to a lack of clarity at best and a dysfunctional/toxic environment at worse.
Once you have decided that forming or developing a team is the right decision for what you want to achieve, from there you can go on to ensure that that team thrives. If your team is dysfunctional, toxic, or coasting you need absolute clarity on what behaviours you need to be truly highperforming and slowly build the necessary environment to embrace agreed behaviours to move in the desired direction. Research shows that truly high-performing teams are measured by more than just their sales figures. They view their teammates as more trustworthy, they work more efficiently, develop better connections, and view each other as more competitive.
The Wisdom of Teams
by Jon R Katzenbach and Douglas K Smith
The Wisdom of Teams is the definitive work on how to create high-performance teams in any organization. Having sold nearly a half million copies and been translated into more than 15 languages, the authors’ clarion call that teams should be the basic unit of organization for most businesses has permanently shaped the way companies reach the highest levels of performance.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
by Patrick Lencioni
Patrick Lencioni begins by telling the fable of a woman who, as CEO of a struggling Silicon Valley firm, took control of a dysfunctional executive committee and helped its members succeed as a team. Lencioni offers explicit instructions for overcoming the human behavioural tendencies that he says corrupt teams.
Ivan Hollingsworth is the founder and director of Centric Consultants – a business founded in a bid to tackle ‘culture-washing’ and support business leaders to build strong, sustainable, high-performing teams based on trust and psychological safety. For more insights on what company culture truly means, and how to can implement change across your business follow Centric Consultants on LinkedIn or email Ivan directly at ivan@centric-consultants.com