What is a Real Team?

Teams have been defined as a small group of people with complementary skills committed to a common purpose and specific performance goals.¹ The work of real teams requires collaboration and interdependence among team members. This means the leadership role tends to shift among team members rather than remain static. And, it means people with different jobs and skill sets must work together in a coordinated effort—in parallel and simultaneously—to be effective.

The cross-functional nature of real teams is key. A team is not a team unless its members perform fundamentally different roles. For instance, a typical advertising or design team consists of an account manager, copywriter, art director, production manager, media planner, and traffic manager. Each team member contributes a different component to the client solution. Yet all work on this solution at the same time and pursue the same goal, typically, to raise the brand equity of the client’s products or services.

What Teams Are NOT

Contrast these team characteristics with those of groups. In working groups, work is a sum of individual contributions, and the assigned tasks aren’t truly interdependent. Such groups usually have one permanent leader, and tasks are performed in series (like an assembly line) rather than in parallel—with minimal task coordination among members.

An example might help. Sales managers are famous for calling their sales forces “teams.” The sales reps, however, all are doing basically the same job: serving their individual territory or customer base, The performance of one rep does not depend on another. In other words, each performance is essentially an individual performance—and the sales department’s performance is the sum of each individual effort.

The important distinction here is that calling a team a team doesn’t make it one. Most “teams” are in fact working groups that are best served by tactics that raise each individual’s performance, e.g., through sales training or better sales management software. Team building won’t raise their collective performance on iota because their work isn’t the cross-functional, interdependent work of a team.

Some even worse examples of a misapplied “team” label—especially from a performance perspective—are committees, boards, and dreaded compromise/consensus groups, which often pose as teams. These kinds of ineffective groups tend to occur in organizations that force-fit teams into settings or situations where they don’t belong, and where the work could be better done by one or two qualified individuals.

The Importance of Real Teams Today

As many organizations become less hierarchical and bureaucratic to keep pace with the knowledge and information age, the need for real teams keeps growing. This means that the capacity of an organization to build and utilize teams can be a major competitive advantage. Indeed, developing real teams ranks among the most powerful tool modern organizations can leverage to increase their effectiveness. More than any other organizational structure, effective teams offer the flexibility and performance-focus to respond quickly to change and continuously improve—but only if the team’s really a team.

“Team building is a process, not an event.” ²

William Dyer

Footnotes

1. Katzenbach, J. R & Smith, D. K (2015). The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. Brighton, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
2. Dyer Jr., W. G., Dyer, J. H. & Dyer, W. G. (2013). Team Building: Proven Strategies for Improving Team Performance, 5th Ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.