Teams and groups are not the same. A group is just a collection of people with a shared interest. A team is much more focused with specific roles, ways of working, objectives, sense of mission and required performance standards.

The first issue to think about in terms of creating a team is to think of the roles people play in the team as well as their specialist professional role, e.g. lawyer, design engineer and so forth.

All teams need an ideas person who can trigger the creative processes of the team. We also need someone to coordinate the team’s activities, someone else to set the direction of the team, and someone to manage and calm down any conflict which may occur in the team.

Someone else needs to focus on gaining resources for the team and developing contacts outside the team. Someone needs to implement the ideas created in the team sessions and someone else needs to check and follow through those ideas to completion.

Someone needs to take the ‘view from the balcony’ of the team and monitor the effectiveness and quality of its operation and outputs. Finally many teams need specialist input, even if only part time.

However, despite our knowledge of the importance of team roles many teams do not perform as effectively as they might, particularly top management teams.

If we want a team to perform effectively it has to be built on trust amongst its members to avoid the ‘invulnerability’ effect where team members will not admit that they
are anything other than perfect. In particular, if the ‘invulnerability’ effect exists in a team, its members certainly will not bring to the attention of the team any issues which are not looking good, particularly if it is their area of responsibility.

The next issue relating to a sound team foundation is that conflict and disagreement needs to be handled effectively and openly to avoid the real meetings taking place after the scheduled meeting. This leads to a tendency to create ‘in crowds’ and ‘out crowds’ and cliques rather than one properly bonded team.

Shared goals and standards of performance are important to avoid ambiguity in the way the team works together.

Finally the team needs to focus on team outputs rather than the gratification of individual egos and ‘political’ disagreements within the team.

These five issues together with setting a team credo of vision, mission and values for what the team is trying to achieve and how it achieves its objectives are vital in creating an effective team.

In summary;

•Make sure your team is balanced with all roles represented within the team even if one person has two roles.

•Check that the five issues of trust, conflict management, shared goals, agreed standards of performance and team outputs are being dealt with effectively.

•Create a team credo of mission, vision and values. Your team needs a clear focus and purpose, a picture of what it is trying to create in the future and a set of values of what is important in the way it goes about its business.