In large companies today, a lot of work is done in teams. There are many types of teams – some have a clearly defined leader; others are deliberately nonhierarchical – but the key defining feature is some sort of collective responsibility for outcomes.

In theory, a team should be able to achieve more than a random group of individuals because team members have complementary knowledge and skills. But in reality, teams often end up making poor decisions. Studies of famous political misjudgments (for example, the Bay of Pigs fiasco) and business blunders (such as Time Warner buying America Online) have shown how easy it is for teams to make suboptimal decisions – for example, veering into groupthink or not giving enough voice to minority opinions.

Today, there is lots of research evidence for how to make teams effective. For example, a study at MIT highlighted such things as diversity of team members, equal contribution to discussion, and social skills. And a recent study at Google emphasized the importance of a supportive team environment for producing high-quality outcomes (also called psychological safety).

But even though we know how to build a great team in theory, the challenge of doing it in practice is still considerable. You need to develop real skill as a manager to get the best from your team, and the purpose of this chapter is to suggest some practical ways of building that skill.

The first challenge is to formally define the team's charter (#70) so that it is clear and meaningful to everyone. Ideally, this is done at the point when the team is formed, but it is also useful to review team charters periodically. Once they are up and running, you also need to brief your team clearly (#71), which means communicating effectively about what is happening in the rest of the organization and keeping the team updated on any problems. A related technique is building trust in your team (#72) so that people feel safe to share problems and try out new ideas – without fear of being criticized. And at the heart of everything, there is a need for you to work on your personal relationships with team members so that they understand and trust you. We offer the Johari window as one technique for building openness and self-knowledge (#73).

We then provide some ideas for how to understand team-specific motivation (#74) so that you can be more effective at structuring the work they do to make it as satisfying and engaging as possible. Finally, we look at where teamwork can go wrong by exploring Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

70. Formally Define the Team's Mission, Authority, Resources, and Boundaries (Team Charters)

When people work well together as a team, they can achieve great things, and the experience can be wonderful for all involved. However, there are also situations where the results are terrible: Passionate people pull in different directions, they argue with one another, they fall out, and they fail to achieve the team's mission, sometimes in a spectacular way.

Sometimes the problems are caused by personality differences. Often, though, it is misunderstandings about the team's purpose and the roles of individuals in achieving it, which is why it's so important to make these things clear right from the start.

You can set your team members up for success by working with them to agree on a team charter. The charter ensures that everyone knows what the team's purpose is, what people's jobs are within it, what the team has the power to do and what it doesn't, and what resources it can draw on. The charter also helps team members agree with one another on how they will work together so that things run smoothly for everyone.

The exact content of your team charter will vary from situation to situation, but it will be most useful when it's negotiated and agreed upon by the people setting the team up, the team leader, and team members. The following headers are often useful:

• Context – This explains why the team exists, what problem it needs to solve, and how its work fits with the broader objectives of the organization. (If you're using an OGSM [objectives, goals, strategies, and measures] or OKRs [objectives and key results] – see Chapter 5 – include relevant parts of these here.)
• Mission and objectives – This is a short, clear statement of what the team needs to achieve and deliver. It provides focus and helps people decide quickly whether specific activities are contributing to the team's goals.
• Stakeholders – This identifies the external stakeholders that the team needs to communicate with and satisfy to achieve its mission.
• Composition and roles – This defines the “design” of the team – who will participate in it, what their roles will be, and how much of their time will be allocated to it. In structuring the team, the leader needs to understand people's strengths, weaknesses, skills, and experiences and make sure that the right things are being done by the right people. This is quite a subtle piece of work, and it involves thinking about resourcing levels and team and subteam structure. It also involves making sure that there is appropriately diverse input into problem solving and decision making (see Chapters 6-8 for why this matters) and that all stakeholders are appropriately represented.
• Authority and empowerment – This says what the team is able to do under its own initiative and what it must seek permission to do. For example, is it empowered to hire new people? What payment sign-off levels does it have? And can it insist that team members focus on the team's work exclusively? The team's boundaries are also defined here so that the team's work does not conflict with work done by other teams in the organization.
• Resources and support available – This defines the resources available to the team (including money, time, equipment, and people) so that team members are aware of and know to use them. This section also defines the training and coaching that are available, as well as external help that the team can draw on.
• Operations – This final part of the charter defines how the team will work on a day-to-day basis. This covers such things as when the team meets and what team members will do, the standards of behavior people expect from one another, how decisions will be made, and how they will give feedback to one another.

Some parts of the charter are created by the people setting the team up. The team leader drafts some other parts, and others are written by the team members working together. What's important is that everyone involved has a fair opportunity to challenge and negotiate the draft charter so that there is buy-in to it.

71. Brief Your Team Clearly

A good team charter gives team members the information they need to succeed, right from the start. But teams can't work in isolation: They need to know what's going on in the organization and the wider world around them so that they can adapt to these changing circumstances.

The best way to provide this context is through regular team briefings. These are short sessions where you update team members on what's happening in the organization, and you then take their questions. These briefings build organizational awareness, they reduce the risk of misunderstandings and gossip, and they help to build trust within the team. To do this effectively:

• Run regular briefings, ideally straight after decision-making meetings, so that people get information promptly and directly from you (rather than through the office grapevine).
• Keep the briefing focused on the key information people need to know. You can often structure this using the four Ps headings:

• Progress – How the team and organization have performed against the target and what progress has been made since the last briefing.
• Procedures – Changes to policies or ways of doing things that people need to know about.
• People – Who is joining the team or organization? Who is leaving? And are there any people-related changes that people should know about?
• Points for action – Priorities that people need to address in the period ahead and actions they need to take.

• Take questions, and answer them as openly as you can while still respecting confidentiality. (If there are things you can't discuss, acknowledge this and make it clear that you'll update people when you are able.)
• Make sure your team members brief their own teams immediately afterward, and that information ripples down through the organization, so that everyone knows what's going on.
• If people have questions you can't answer or have concerns or worries that you can't deal with, follow up on these with your manager, and do what you can to address them after the briefing.

As you're doing this, focus on getting the key messages across to your people, keep your message positive but truthful, and “own the message” – don't try to distance yourself from it.

72. Build Trust in Your Team

By keeping people up to date and being open with them about challenges, you'll start to build trust between yourself and your team.

In simple terms, trust is a belief that others won't exploit your vulnerabilities. In a low-trust environment, people don't take risks and they don't share their problems because they are worried about being criticized or exploited. There will be things that people simply won't do because it leaves them feeling unacceptably exposed. As a result, change fails, productivity declines, innovation falters, and talented people fail to reach their potential – and they leave.

A high-trust environment, in contrast, is one with a lot of give and take, one where you can work efficiently and effectively together. People can be flexible and take intelligent risks while being confident that others around them will support them and look after them. So, how can you achieve this type of high-trust environment in your team?

As with everything, begin with yourself and the way you behave. Work hard to build the skills you need to be effective, develop your emotional intelligence so that you deal with people maturely (#53), and take care with your problem solving and decision making (see Chapters 6 and 7). All of this helps you build your reputation for competence and good judgment so that people trust you to make the right decisions.

At the same time, earn trust by being a model of the integrity you want to see in your people. Keep your promises. Communicate openly and honestly. Support your team members, look out for their interests, and involve them in significant decisions whenever you sensibly can.

It is also smart to avoid placing blame. Mistakes happen, and as long as people have done their best, the right thing to do is to work together to fix the problem and move forward while learning from the situation and making sure it doesn't happen again. (Clearly, where people haven't made their best effort or have acted in a way that isn't aligned with the team's interests, you need to deal with this appropriately.)

Next, get to know your people personally. Take some time to find out about their families and personal interests, and share personal information about your own. Encourage social and team-building events where people can get to know one another as individuals.

Break down cliques within your team by varying work patterns so that different people work with one another, and discuss how harmful it is to have in-groups and out-groups and to have people feeling isolated and unsupported by the rest of the team.

Finally, make sure that people show good team behavior when they deal with one another, that they support other team members, and that they're open, generous, and conscientious in the way they work.

73. Build Openness and Self-Knowledge within a Team (The Johari Window)

Openness is important for building trust, partly because it allows people to get to the root of problems quickly and partly because it helps to make sure that people get plenty of feedback. So how can you build openness in your team? This is where the Johari window, used sensitively, can help people to be more open with one another.

Developed by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, the word Johari comes from a combination of their names. You can see the Johari window in Figure 13.1.

The Johari window is a way of thinking systematically about how you are known and understood by others. One axis depicts how much you know about yourself; the other depicts how much others know about you. The window is split into four quadrants:

1. The open area represents things that you and other people know about you. This includes the way that you behave and the knowledge, skills, and personal history that the people you work with are aware of.
2. The blind area contains things that you don't know about yourself but others can see. This is where their feedback can help you improve the way you work, and it's where you can discover talents that you didn't know you had.
3. The hidden area represents things that you know about yourself but others don't know. You can build trust by disclosing some of these things (but be wise in the way you do this).
4. The unknown area contains things about you that neither you nor others know.

There are two ways of using the Johari window. One is simply to encourage people to expand the open area of the window by disclosing harmless information to one another and by asking for and giving one another feedback. This helps people build understanding of one another, and it helps them learn about their own strengths. (Do this sensitively: Don't pressure people to make self-disclosures they'll regret, and make sure that feedback is gentle and positive.)

A more systematic approach is to use a list of 56 neutral or positive adjectives that describe people. Each person picks, say, five adjectives that they think best apply to themselves and then they pick five adjectives that apply to each of their peers. These are then inserted into the grid for each person, and people discuss what they can see. This gives plenty of opportunities for self-disclosure and positive, kind feedback, all of which helps to build trust.

74. Find the Specific Motivators That Work Best with Your Team (Understand Team-Specific Motivation)

In Chapter 9 (#51 and #54), we looked at specific techniques and approaches you can use to motivate individuals. It takes a lot of time to use these tools well, but you can make a great start by addressing motivation at a team level. If you can get a handle on the common motivators for people on your team, you can structure the way they interact with each other, which in turn will help them get the best out of their work. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Bring your people together, and get them to write down the things that motivate them as individuals. These could be things such as money, purpose, promotion prospects, recognition, achievement, personal growth, and camaraderie, but they could also include having a nice working environment or flexible working arrangements. Encourage them to come up with as many as possible.
2. Go around the room, with each person listing their most important motivators. Write these on a whiteboard, and consolidate suggestions so that similar things come under the same heading. Then go through each heading, discussing what each one means, so that people come to a common understanding.
3. Next, ask the team to look at the list and write down their top five (say) motivators in order. The top motivator gets five points, the second gets four, and so on down the list.
4. Individuals then write their personal scores against each of these motivators on the whiteboard. By adding these scores up, you can identify your team's top motivators. But you can also see whether there are big differences across the members of the team.
5. Finally, brainstorm how to structure the team's work to deliver on these motivators while also achieving the overall goals. Then, if they make sense, do these things.

By following this approach, you'll see increased team motivation; you'll also find that people take real ownership of the team's working process and commit more strongly to the team.

75. Manage Negative Behaviors and Resolve Conflict (Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team)

So far in this chapter, we've looked at ways to set your team up for success. However, you also need to keep an eye out for things going wrong, and this is where it helps to be aware of Patrick Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team. Published in 2002, Lencioni's book suggests five major sources of dysfunctionality:

1. An absence of trust – We looked at the importance of trust and how you can build it in #72. A lack of trust manifests itself in a number of ways: People avoid social events and teamwork; they don't ask for help from one another; they cover up mistakes and weaknesses; and they generally withdraw from the team and try to avoid working with one another.

   You can start to deal with these problems by behaving in a trustworthy way yourself, but in addition, you need to deal with the behaviors that are undermining trust. So talk with your team to understand what's going on, and look out for behaviors that threaten the cohesion of the team or individuals within it. You'll need to deal with these firmly – positive measures to build trust won't be effective until you've dealt with the underlying issues.

2. Fear of conflict – Conflict within a team is often uncomfortable, but it can also be highly productive when it involves people respectfully testing and challenging one another's ideas, with better ideas emerging as a result.

   Signs of a fear of conflict include people holding their opinions back, avoiding awkward truths during meetings, and talking behind other people's backs. To get past these problems, encourage people to engage in healthy debate, and support them when they do – but make sure that debate is focused on ideas and not on individuals. Also, learn and teach conflict resolution techniques – we'll look at a useful one in #76.

3. Lack of commitment – Another downside of people not sharing their ideas is that they may feel they haven't been heard. They may think that plans haven't been discussed properly, or they may know that conflict hasn't been resolved and they may wait to see “which side wins.” As a result, they don't commit to plans, they continue talking and not doing, and opportunities are missed.

   Deal with this by getting everyone's input on decisions, clarifying uncertainties where you can, discussing plans thoroughly, and using transparent decision-making approaches. (See Chapter 7; you may also want to use voting approaches such as multivoting or the modified Borda count – see the links below for more on these.)

4. Avoidance of accountability – A lack of accountability or “ownership” has predictable negative consequences as team members don't hold one another to high standards, and they don't cover for team members who are struggling.

   Address this problem by clarifying responsibilities with a team charter (#70), running retrospectives (#31), setting up a system of team rewards for the achievement of team goals, and by dealing with poor performance (#79) if people don't take appropriate responsibility.

5. Inattention to results – This happens where people have lost focus on the team's goals, perhaps because other objectives have more prominence, perhaps because of infighting, or perhaps because they're more focused on advancing their own careers than they are on the team's mission.

   You can spot this when the team routinely fails to deliver good results, when people are focusing on the wrong goals, and when talented, results-oriented people get frustrated and choose to leave the team.

   Deal with this problem by refocusing team members with a team charter, by reminding them of the OGSM (#26), by setting clear OKRs (#27), and by addressing poor performance if this doesn't work.

Source: Adapted from Lencioni 2005. Reproduced with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.