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Managing teams is a balancing act

When you manage a team you are judged by your boss and by the team you manage. You are judged on the achievement of targets and your success as a people-manager, both of individuals and of the team as a whole. Managing teams is therefore a huge challenge. It is also a hugely rewarding career!

I first became a manager of a team in the 1970s and in the early days I made every mistake imaginable! In the 1980s I trained properly in team management and leadership and had a lot more success. Since then, I’ve managed formal and informal teams, teams of volunteers and staff, virtual teams and cross-functional teams.

In the 1990s I started designing and delivering training events in the management of teams for public and private sector organizations. This gave me a further insight beyond my own direct experience, in the pitfalls and possibilities of team management.

This book is a distillation of what I have learned over the years about managing teams. The book contains 50 secrets about the successful management of teams, which, if you follow them, will save you and your teams from a lot of misery. The secrets are organized into seven themed chapters.

• Is this a team? You need to ensure that you have a team, not just a bunch of people! This is the foundation of getting it right.

• Form your team. Teams don’t just happen by chance; you have to work to create a team. That means you have to understand about teams, not just people.

• Lead your team. If you are going to be a team manager then you have to lead them day-to-day. You can’t sit back and rest on your laurels!

• Communicate with your team. Most complaints about team managers relate to communication. It is a two-way process, and you have to get it right to be successful.

• Protect and serve your team. You might be the one who gets paid more and has the bigger office, but your job is to protect and serve your team, not the other way round.

• Manage team changes. Nothing stays the same for long. Teams change and the work changes. The team looks to you to manage them through the changes.

• Disband your team. When the time comes, people don’t like to leave without saying goodbye. If you manage the team disbandment well, the future opportunities are greater for all.

Whether you have been managing teams for a while or are a new leader, you will find that by using these secrets your people will follow you far more readily and willingly than if you don’t.

The way you manage teams affects lots of people; it also affects your standing in the world.

Is this a team?

You may have the title of ‘team manager’ or ‘team leader’, but that doesn’t mean you actually have a ‘team’! A team has characteristics that set it apart from being just a group of people. If you don’t recognize these characteristics, your team might fragment, or the work won’t be done, or you might even find that a charismatic member of the team will actually become the real team manager whilst you flounder at the edge!

1.1 Know what you mean by ‘team’

First of all, you need to be sure that you have a real team and not simply a group of people who have been put into the same room/organization/coloured shirt! Make sure you have a clear understanding of what a ‘team’ is from the outset.

There are several definitions for the word ‘team’, depending on different situations. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology defines a team as: ‘People working together in a committed way to achieve a common goal or mission. The work is interdependent and team members share responsibility and hold themselves accountable for attaining the results.’

Shorter definitions simply refer to a group of people and a common goal. Some definitions include interdependence of team members rather than the ability to function alone. Some add the requirement for team members to work cooperatively or harmoniously, defining the style of the interaction as well as the actuality. A team may be created for a specific task or it may have a longer lifespan. Some definitions include mutual accountability and responsibility for a team.

“I realised that I did not so much “lead a team” as preside over a bunch of egos”

Anonymous manager in the banking industry

From this you can see that although individual definitions of ‘team’ show some variation, there are some fairly universal concepts, which can be defined as:

• Teams have a common goal or purpose.

• Teams have more than one member.

• Teams have complementary skills and abilities.

• Teams work together.

So before you read any further in this book, ask yourself:

• “Do I have a group of people who all know that they actually belong to one team?” (Have you checked?)

• “Do they all have a common purpose that is clear, articulated and understood by all?” (Are you sure?)

• “Are they a group of people who have complementary skills and abilities?” (Or have they actually been bunched together because they all have the same skills and knowledge.)

• “Do they work together and depend on each other?” (Or do they just work in the same place, each doing their own thing?)

Don’t assume you have a team until you have common agreement that this group of people is a team.

1.2 Define success for your team

Whether you have a sales team, a customer service team, a medical team, a combat team or a soccer team, there are certain characteristics that the team will need in order to be successful both in terms of how it operates and in relation to its achievement of targets.

1 There is clarity of purpose; members can and will commit themselves to the overall objectives.

2 The team has a clear, explicit and mutually agreed approach: conventions, norms, expectations and rules.

3 The individuals have clear performance goals against which they are measured. These may include a continuous series of milestones along the way to larger goals.

4 The atmosphere tends to be informal and there are no serious tensions. It is a working atmosphere in which people are involved and interested.

one minute wonder Decide before you go any further: “Do I want these people to operate as a team with targets, or am I simply responsible for a group of people?”

5 The team members listen to each other, and new ideas are openly discussed. Everyone has a say.

6 People are welcome to express their feelings about different issues as well as their ideas.

7 Disagreements are carefully examined and resolved rather than crushed. Dissenters are not seen as trying to dominate the group, but as having a genuine difference of opinion.

8 Each individual team member is respectful of the mechanics of the group: arriving on time, coming to meetings prepared, completing agreed upon tasks on time, etc.

9 Constructive feedback is welcomed, and it should be frequent, frank and relatively comfortable – oriented towards improving performance rather than allocating blame.

10 Whilst a single person may have the title of Team Leader, he or she may step quietly aside to allow others to work to their strengths. The issue is not who’s in control at any particular moment, but how to get the job done.

Think about how your people will operate successfully as a team.

1.3 Know when you haven’t got a team

There are numerous reasons why some groups calling themselves a team aren’t really a team. This may not be a problem, but sometimes it is. Teambuilding with a group can be counter-productive, detracting from individual performance without any compensatory collective benefit.

A sales ‘team’ where the individuals work in competition with each other is not a real team. In this environment, the nature of competition and performance-related reward actively discourage team working in favour of an individual meritocracy. In a different example, an accounts office might contain a bought ledger ‘team’ of clerks. However, they all have the same role and so are not complementing each other’s

case study In the early 20th century, when the explorer Ernest Shackleton was selecting his team for the Endeavour Expedition, he expressly selected beyond technical competence in the specific functions, actively seeking people who showed personality traits that he felt would complement each other in the challenging environment that he knew was coming. Nowadays, a team manager has more objective tools at his or her disposal to help with this, such as psychometric assessments and ‘team roles’ questionnaires.

skills within the ‘team’. To recruit for either of the above examples is relatively straightforward: find people with exactly the same knowledge and skill and the job is virtually done!

A team, on the other hand, can be much more difficult to form:

• Members of a team are selected for their complementary skills, not a single commonality. A business team may consist of an accountant, three sales people, a warehouseman, a delivery driver and a secretary, for example.

• Each member of the team has an individual purpose and function relevant to the team’s overall objective. This means that there will be interdependencies between team members.

• The success of these interdependencies relies to a greater or lesser extent upon the relationships and interactions between the team members. There is usually not as much room for conflict when working as a team, or for independence. This creates challenges in selecting team members; do you select complementary personalities or people who have a lot in common?

Complementary skills and interdependencies make a real team; otherwise, ‘team’ is just a label.

1.4 Plan to be a real team leader

There are lots of people in the world who use the title of Team Manager or Team Leader but are not genuinely doing anything to lead or manage. Sometimes this is a pure sinecure, while in other cases these people are deluding themselves.

Sinecure Team Leaders/Managers

People may be given the title of Team Manager as a sinecure (See Jargon buster) so that the organization can push them to the sidelines or a position where they can do no damage.

Sometimes this action follows the concept of the so-called ‘Peter Principle’, where a person has been promoted to a level beyond their competence. If no-one has the strength to remove them, they may be given a grand-sounding job title and marginalized. On the other hand, many organizations give sinecure job titles as a genuine way of recognizing and retaining technical talent. “We need to keep this person and give them more status, so we will call them a team leader but we don’t actually expect team management from them.”

one minute wonder Avoid becoming a team leader or manager in name only. Real team leadership is a highly active, challenging and rewarding role.

Delusional Team Leaders/Managers

There are two types of delusional non-managers:

1 People who have always viewed a management role as a ‘privilege without responsibility’. They get the bigger salary and the executive car parking space, and believe their job will be easy because people will automatically respect their rank and status. These people can usually be spotted by their absence! When they are around they have a tendency to ‘throw their weight around’; they bluster and coerce their staff to do their bidding, which often has more to do with bolstering their own egos than with achieving any meaningful objectives.

2 People who genuinely believe they are ‘managing’ but are really getting in the way of people doing their jobs. These people can usually be spotted by their constant calls for progress reports, their insistence on holding meetings in which nothing is agreed, and their micro-management of staff in the mistaken belief that they are somehow “helping”. They regularly introduce new initiatives, but rapidly lose interest in them.

If you have ever seen the TV sitcom called ‘The Office’ (either the original British version or the US spin-off) you will recognize the delusional type described here!

Your team will soon notice if you are a delusional team manager.

1.5 Check that you have some followers

If leadership is ‘the relationship between those who choose to lead and those who choose to follow’, then it is as important for a team to have followers as it is for the team to have a leader.

‘Followership’, however, is seldom an act of blind faith and unquestioning obedience (at least not in business), but a set of behaviours and characteristics that have been summed up by Keith Morgan (2005), who identified key elements that underpin effective followership.

• Effective followers know what’s expected of them; they make sure that their role/tasks have been clearly communicated to them and that they are clear about their responsibilities.

• Effective followers seek to establish and maintain lines of two-way communication to reduce the risk of unclear messages.

• Effective followers take initiative, keeping their leader informed. This is not just about personal action but may involve influencing other people.

• Effective followers challenge flawed plans. This is one of the most valuable contributions that can be made by an effective follower. It is also one of the most difficult, since there is a risk of appearing negative, or distrustful of the leader’s judgement.

“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader”

Attributed to Ledru-Rollin (1807–74), French radical politician

• Effective followers provide accurate feedback to their leader and their colleagues. This means providing both good and bad news in a timely, diplomatic and honest way.

• Effective followers support the leader’s efforts – all leaders need support and encouragement. This also means acting as advocates among their peer group and attempting to quash rumours.

It is a managerial responsibility to create an environment that encourages followership. This table summarizes the ideal conditions and behaviours of the followers and manager:

Effective ‘followership’ is a prerequisite of effective team management.