We believe that these are two very good, very concise working definitions of what teams are and what teams do.

The misuse of the term "team" seems to us to be rampant in businesses today. The impression we get is people believe the use of the word "team" will create teamwork. To the contrary, the misuse of the word "team" erects obstacles to the formation of real teams by setting bad examples of teams and teamwork.

Chances are there are groups called teams in your business organization. Are they small groups of people committed to something larger than themselves? Are they committed to changing something important in the business, or are they defending the status quo? Are they likely to foster the formation of real teams in your organization?

Leading Factors in Team Success

Conventional wisdom points to things like technical qualifications and individual motivation as the root of team success. But the reasons teams excel or fail have less to do with those two factors, and more to do with the behavioral style of the team as a whole, the personalities of its members and the degree to which the team represents the real stakeholders in the team's work products.

Team Styles

Human Synergistics has developed a team profiling system they call Group Styles Inventory (GSI). Human Synergistics GSI

We use the GSI in our Team Launch Workshop  to assess team styles, so we can apply the right training at the right time. Of the 12 factors Human Synergistics has identified as pivotal to team success or failure, only two are remotely similar to technical expertise and personal motivation.

Human Factors in Team Performance

Sandra Fürst served as a member of a very successful team we trained and coached, based in Germany. She left to complete her MBA in Zurich. Her MBA Thesis, Determining the Relationships Between Team Performance, Soft Skills and Personality Types in High-Tech Industry, September 2004, presents a very clear picture of the primary causes of team success or failure. Hint: It's not technical experience or work ethics. Although those things may seem important, they do not correlate with team performance.

Download Sandra Fürst's thesis (1 MB PDF). It's an eye opener for people who want high-performance teams. Even if you believe you have high performance teams, you may see room for significant improvement.

What is NOT a team

Far too often we find the word team badly misunderstood and misapplied in businesses of all kinds and all sizes. We have seen the word team used to describe virtually any collection of two or more people. There is often an adjective attached, e.g., the management team, the strategic planning team, or the sales team. These are not teams unless they have all the attributes in the Working Definition above. Do they?

Management "Team"

Barry Oshry, in his book Seeing Systems, describes executive management as an aggregate of individuals with individual responsibilities, dedicated to establishing and defending their independent responsibilities and authority. His conclusions were drawn on the results of more than 200 experiments he calls "Power Labs" and his observations over many years as a business consultant. He has never seen an example in which executive management consistently worked as a team. We haven't seen one either. But we have only been looking for 40 years!

Strategic Planning "Team"

In many companies, people are assigned to the annual rite of creating the new Strategic Plan. The word team is often included in the assignment memo, as if the word itself will create teamwork. It does not. Individuals write sections and chapters with little or no interaction, and someone at a higher level "pulls it all together".

Sales "Team"

Sales people who are independently responsible for designated customers or designated territories, chasing individual quotas, are not teams. They are an aggregation of sales people, a functional element in the overall organization organization, a workgroup perhaps, but not a team.

Other Examples

Committees and workgroups are not teams, either. In both cases, individuals have causes that they consider more important than the causes of the group. There is an effort by members to get their cause included in the group work product, to give their cause more strength and credibility.

As we see it, no part of a functional hierarchy operates as a team. The behavior of a hierarchy is the polar opposite of teamwork. The purpose is to divide responsibility to achieve order, efficiency and accountability. People in hierarchies often mention their "silos" or their "sandboxes" or their "turf". These things are important in hierarchies. They simply have no meaning in a team.

Let's Not Kid Ourselves

Call executives executives. Call management management. Call a group a group. Call a committee a committee. Call an aggregate an aggregate. Reserve the keyword "team" for real teams with the attributes in the first two sections above.