As we look back with fading memories to life before the Covid pandemic, we find ourselves still functioning with processes that we thought would be temporary, and in particular how we work with teams. Words like ‘hybrid’ and ‘remote’ frequently precede our use of teams. There is no guarantee that people will all be in the same country, let alone the same room. Not everyone is happy about this and can point out all the problems associated with it.
A recent online article by Benjamin Tarshis and Jonathan Roberts in Strategy+Business (read it here) asks whether the problem is the mode of meeting, or if the problems actually existed anyway. A key point in the article is that “[t]he COVID-19 pandemic didn’t create a teaming crisis. IT exposed deficiencies in the in-person model while introducing more complexity.” They go so far as to questions whether we are even using the term ‘teams’ correctly. Instead, perhaps we are putting too much under the banner of a team, and instead, the authors propose three types of groups:
- Real Teams: deal with specific problems or projects with strong emotional commitment from members who share leadership have high engagement and robust discussion.
- Working Groups: handle the routine business as usual and are more concerned with information sharing with low engagement and typically have a single leader
- Team-in-name-only: Have undermined roles and needs with poor or no leadership and spend a lot of time doing very little.
The common form in business tends to be the Team-in-name-only where people are assigned and told their part of a team, but with little engagement or direction. The article identifies two ways the team-in-name-only manifests. The first is through meeting bloat whereby virtual meetings means where we used to have 10 people attend, we can now invite as many as we like from anywhere on the plant – and we do. The second is by the excessive use of email and online chat that has replaced the in-person connections we used to have.
Offering some suggestions to address these issues, Tarshis and Roberts propose we:
- Ask whether you need to function as a working group or a real team – doing so allows you to clarify expectations and commit accordingly.
- Shrink your group size – interestingly they suggest the idea size for a virtual team is three, and for a working group up to eight.
- Make the implicit explicit – that is, clearly state and frequently restate the team behaviours expected.
There is a lot of good advice in the article that can help clarify the purpose of appointing people to teams, and the expectations on them.