There's No Such Thing As A Real Team
Worried about whether your team is a “real team?” It doesn’t matter.
REAL Team?
Real teams
I’ve written about how I created a team effectiveness framework while I was working at Mars, Inc. The idea was to use this framework in our core manager development programs. By the time I started work on what would eventually be called the Mars High Performance Collaboration Framework I had worked with over 120 teams at Mars. I used the data collected during these team engagements for the research that led to our framework. When I shared the initial insights from that research with my boss at the time, including a draft version of the framework, he asked me, “Well, is this for real teams? Or is it for groups? Or what?” I answered smugly, “Yes.”
There’s a school of thought out there, grounded in fine work by scholars and researchers, that says there are real teams and not real teams. According to these experts there are various aspects of a group that either make a team real, or something else. The debate about what is a real team and what isn’t, while interesting, is purely academic.
What matters is not defining “TEAM”, but defining the work needed to be done
I stopped worrying about what’s a real team and what’s not when, though my research, I discovered what really matters. It’s not about real team or not real team. The key is to define which work doesn’t require collaboration and which does, and to focus on that.
At Mars, every group that got together, whether is was six finance people in Franklin, TN or 80 R&D folks meeting in a hotel in London, thought of themselves as a team. It’s true, we’ve gotten sloppy about how we use the word team. But that broad, undifferentiated use of “team” is so ingrained that it’s not a battle worth fighting. If you’re 80 R&D people meeting in London and that’s how you think of yourselves, fine. The key is to know what’s the work within that group of 80 that might require some level of collaboration and to focus your team effectiveness efforts there. There probably isn’t any work that will require the active participation of all 80. But there is likely important work that will involve groups of 3, or 4 or sub-teams of 10 for example. Actual collaboration could happen at these levels, even if these groups are not so-called real teams.
One of the aspects scholars use to determine what’s a real team and what’s not is size. Before our framework existed I was working in Russia with the Global M&Ms team, a group of around 75 people. I found myself in a debate with the leader of this team about whether or not it was a real team. “No,” he said emphatically, “we are a real team. We’re cohesive, we’re all working on the same brand!” This was a frustrating and ultimately useless conversation. As I would later learn it did not matter how big the team was. What is important is to know where what I now call the “units of collaboration” are, who needs to be involved and what they are going to produce.
Size doesn’t matter
Size does not matter. Nor does the label a group uses for itself. Whether you’re called a council, a committee, or a board the same thinking about units of collaboration applies. Focus on the work needing collaboration and get on with it.
That’s my good news for this blog. Let’s not worry about whether or not we’re a real team, how big a group we are or what we’re called. Those aren’t debates worth having. Let’s instead talk about what needs collaboration and how we are going to do it. Let’s do our team effectiveness work around those areas of collaboration, and do our relationship building around them. This approach yields better results and creates more value for you and your organization.
