Building effective teams

Effective teams are at the core of any organization’s success. Ask any successful leader tasked with achieving the impossible to pick the top 5 things that contributed the most to their success and chances are that they will attribute a large portion of their success to their teams. Ask the same managers about the most challenging tasks they faced in their journey and chances are they will call out their team building efforts as one of them. So, despite the widespread wisdom of the effectiveness and importance of effective teams, why is it so difficult to build one?

As a member of some very effective teams and also some not so effective ones, I struggled with this puzzle for several years. I secretly dreaded the day when I will be called upon to create a team of my own before embarking on a deal-clinching record-smashing type of endeavour. Blaming the poor team dynamics for missed targets and lost opportunities is an easy way out of an organizational quagmire for most leaders. I took mental notes on getting out of tricky situations by observing my leaders and peers, and their modus-operandi. This was before the time when I started harbouring desires of starting a small company. Owning and running the operations of my own company did not offer me the cushion of learning from my own mistakes. I had to observe and learn from the mistakes of my peers.

What follows is a distillation of some very personal and unorthodox ideas on what makes a team tick. Careful, these are not ideas to build a great team but effective teams. At this juncture, I find it important to state the difference between the two. In my humble opinion, effective teams are excellent at achieving targets and meeting goals. If you need to grow your business by venturing in new territories, you need effective teams. This team will do all the necessary market analysis, competitor research and product development to meet the deadline for a perfect launch. But if you want to put the first man on Mars or dive to the yet unexplored depths of our deepest oceans, you need a great team. Great teams are driven by something more than just goals and deadlines. They are hungry for making a mark and leaving a legacy. But more on great teams in some other post. Let’s focus on effective teams for now.

In the following paragraphs I’ve tried to be honest about my experiences in effective teams and my analysis of what worked and not. As is with most things on internet these days, I am sure that my views might not agree with several others’, but please consider this not as a commentary or critique on any previous work but my sole opinion and should be consumed as such.

• Effective teams need effective leaders – I cannot stress enough the importance of leaders in taking teams to great heights. I believe that effective leadership is the single most important thing that makes teams achieve extraordinary results. On several occasions I have witnessed from close quarters how brilliant individual contributors flaked when led by ineffective leaders. In my most recent paid engagement with a client, a team was managed by a very under-confident and ineffective project manager. The result was that the members were perennially dissatisfied by his approach to things and could not concentrate on their work. This had a rippling effect on the team’s feedback from important stakeholders. Miraculously, when the project manager left to pursue his own ambitions, and the team came under the aegis of a better leader, the team found its confidence back. Unshackled by earlier hurdles, I saw the team quickly rise from the ashes. After over a year of mismanagement, the team was able to turn things around within 6 months and was soon in the good books of the executive leadership.
• Diversity not just for the sake of being diverse – Diversity in teams can be a powerful factory of ideas and resources. It is difficult to over-emphasize the value and perspectives that diverse participants bring to brainstorming sessions and to the understanding of a problem. However, it is also of vital importance to not fall in the diversity trap for earning brownie points in management meetings. But is diversity only limited to parameters like race or geographical origin? In keeping with the times, organizations spend considerable resources in building diverse teams but the element of diversity is only limited to gender, race or social background. Subtler traits like education specialization, economic background, technology specialization, age groups etc. can also provide the diversity that can be a significant force in teams. Seemingly unrelated and less relevant sources of diversity can also bring new ideas that give dimensions to problems that were previously unexplored.
• Informal structures create flexible teams – I have been a huge proponent of creating informal structures within teams from the very onset. Informal structures refer to the invisible and undocumented channels of information and power flow within the team, not restricted to the prescribed or official channels. The flow of information over lunch tables and coffee breaks cannot be replaced by email clients and collaboration platforms. The sense of ‘brotherhood’ that compels members to go the extra step to pull their brethren out of a tough one cannot be replaced by overtime and all-nighters. Creating these informal channels is the tough part and there is no one formula that works. In my experience, a lot of it flows from the top down. A rigid structure at the top and adherence to official channels by leadership will only promote adoption of formal structures. Geographically distributed teams that do not get to meet often also tend to adopt more official channels in their interactions. On the other hand, a leader that promotes informal team gatherings and uses these gatherings to disseminate information fosters growth of informal team dynamics that last longer than official structures do.

My ideas are evolving and like most things, are an interpretation of my understanding of the complex human society that has evolved over centuries. It is imperative that I will have different ideas in the future about effective teams and will keep adding to this blog. In the meanwhile, I would also like to learn from our readers on their ideas of building effective teams.