Week 3
Building the Team

If you’ve ever worked on a jelled team, you know how good it feels. A jelled team has energy. People accomplish great feats. They celebrate and laugh together. They disagree and argue but not disagreeably. Jelled teams don’t happen by accident; teams jell when someone pays attention to building trust and commitment. The jelled teams we’ve seen create and work toward shared goals. Over time they build trust by exchanging and honoring commitments to each other.

Teams, especially management teams, require common goals in order to work together—otherwise, they’ll work as individuals. A development manager doesn’t have to cooperate with a test manager to be successful—but the quality of the product will suffer. A test manager doesn’t have to cooperate with other managers—but the schedule will suffer. A project manager doesn’t have to negotiate with other project managers for scarce resources—but all the other projects will suffer. A VP of Support doesn’t have to cooperate with a VP of Engineering—but customer satisfaction, product quality, and release schedules will suffer. The greater each manager’s span of control in the organization, the more people are affected (negatively) by the lack of cooperation.

Individual managers will naturally optimize for their own success—often at the expense of the entire organization. But creating a management team allows the department and the individual managers to succeed.

Goals have to be real and easily recognizable as valuable. Manufactured goals aren’t compelling—for instance, organizing the release celebration doesn’t support management team formation. Manufactured goals don’t help people see that they need to work together for the department to succeed. Look for systemic problems that the managers need to work together to solve.

Members of a team must work together to succeed. Management may charter a team; the team makes their commitments to each other, not the manager. Productive and effective teams have members who know how to provide peer-to-peer feedback and navigate their way through conflict.

That doesn’t mean that a workgroup—one where members may have similar skills and independent goals—can’t work in a collaborative way. Workgroups share information, help each other, and sometimes make decisions together. But everyone has individual goals, not group goals.

A jelled team with shared goals can outperform a similarly skilled group working as individuals.The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization [KS99] But before you decide to invest in team building, determine whether there really is a need for your group to become a team.