Be Careful About Using Teams

Some people are not happy unless they have got a whole team of people assigned to a task. But your use of teams needs to be balanced against the requirements, and the culture, of your organization. Try not ti use teams just because your leadership books tell you that teams are good. Use them when you need them.

Don’t get us wrong — Designing Leaders is a big advocate of effective collaboration in the workplace. Your employees’ ability to cooperate on tasks, share best practices, and transfer knowledge within the organization, will allow you to move quickly and take advantage of new opportunities. But having a collaborative environment does not mean that every project needs to be a team project.

The proper use of teams is one of the trickiest aspects of modern leadership. In the right circumstances, organizing your employees into teams encourages a kind of synergy that provides results far beyond what any individual could accomplish. But under the wrong conditions, insisting on group work can hurt not just a particular project, but your overall organizational culture as well.

When you assign someone a project, ask yourself what they need to be successful. If an assignment requires multiple skill sets to be integrated in a complementary fashion, then yes, you should consider forming a working group to bring all those skills together. In advertising, for instance, the copywriter, the artist, the marketer, the client account manager, the lawyer…all of these have a role to play, and it is often better to get them together from the start rather than doing the work piece by piece.

But if all your employee needs is information from others, then you should consider having them run solo and simply collect the inputs they need when they need them.

Why? Well, much of it comes down to the issue of control. When you have an individual working on something, they decide what the end result looks like and then they pass it up to you for approval. When you form a team, though, everybody in that group gets a vote. It does not come to you until everyone has reviewed it and approved it. This not only slows down the creative process, it also leads to mediocre results as the group tends toward the least common denominator — the infamous “groupthink” — in order to gain consensus and move on.

Very often, though, the situation does not call for this kind of effort, and creating unnecessary hurdles for employees will limit their innovation. If all you need from other people is information, why give them a say in decision making? Do not create hassles when you don’t need them.

Insisting on teams can also affect your employees’ morale, and their interest in doing good work. One manager in Kuala Lumpur told us he worked for a boss who ended every assignment with “now, you are going to need a working group…” “The implication,” said the manager, “was that none of us were capable of accomplishing anything on our own. Maybe that is not what he meant, but the message that came across was that he did not think much of our abilities.” As a result, a lot of the more motivated people left, leaving behind a group of employees who preferred not to accept responsibility. If you want a successful firm, these are not your ideal people.

So be careful about your use of teams. Do not let a working group be your default position. If you can, let your people do the work you hired them to do, and bring them together only when it really helps.