Team Cult(ure)

The life of a manager is not always easy, but it does come with its own perks and guilty little pleasures. And to me, none of those is quite as gratifying as seeing my team getting along and enjoying the time they spend together. There is nothing like coming back to your desk after hours of long, tiring meetings to find the people on your team helping each other, brainstorming ideas, or simply taking a coffee break together. And take it from me: if you ever catch your most senior employee, a painfully shy and solitary person, jumping in to help a more junior team member without anyone asking him to do so, your heart will quickly fill up with pride as you realize that all your hard work is finally paying off.

It is definitely no surprise to see companies of all sizes encouraging a team-centered culture, and it is easy to see why the ability of cultivating a happy team spirit is such an important skill for the manager of the 21st century. However, it might be time to start wondering if we are not going just a little too far with this trend.

Balanced management

One problem is that team happiness doesn’t necessary equate team performance, and people-pleasing managers might be up for a big surprise when they eventually learn that the hard way. Keeping your team happy is incredibly important, but it is simply insufficient, and it doesn’t take a genius to understand that it can’t all be fun and games: ultimately, your role as a boss is to make sure your team delivers.

Besides, the proponents of the ‘Team First’ movement seem to sometimes forget that any single team, regardless of its performance and its role, is incapable of generating a steady revenue all alone. In fact, in order to achieve maximal productivity, managers must think beyond the team, and make sure that needs are met at all levels within the organization. Allow me to explain.

Nurturing individuals

Sue is a first-time manager, and has her mind set on making her team the happiest in the company. She diligently schedules team-building activities, offsite events, and keeps encouraging healthy communication within her team. She prioritizes team gatherings over 1:1 meetings, which she frequently skips or cancels, but she doesn’t think it is a big deal since she speaks with her team members all the time anyways. Overall, she is well appreciated by the people in the group. Yet, soon enough, one of them comes to see her and announces his resignation. She is stunned.

Sue’s problem is that she failed to understand that a happy team starts with happy individuals. By putting so much emphasis on the team, she forgot that her employees are real people with desires, hopes and career goals, who crave a clear career path, a development plan, and maybe simply an empathetic ear to listen to them and bring them support in difficult times. In some way, her cult of the team forced her team members to ignore their personal aspirations and to conform to the expectations she had for the group. Unsurprisingly, they started feeling unfulfilled, without a purpose, maybe even without realizing why they felt that way. In spite of her best efforts, the happiness Sue created was just an illusion.

Successful managers know better and are conscious of the fact that in order to be effective as a team member, an employee must feel good in his/her own shoes. That’s why providing constant guidance, mentorship and always being available to team members is key to building healthy, high-performing teams.

The dangers of team isolation

Jack is the director of a successful engineering team, and just like Sue, he also invests a lot of time and efforts in building an exceptional team culture. Additionally, he knows how to avoid Sue’s mistake and diligently provides personalized guidance to his team members. But his team keeps missing deadlines, and their poor performance is quickly called out by management. Jack can’t wrap his head around what is happening: after all, his team is full of brilliant, high-working people. He decides to talk to them about the last failed project and keeps hearing the same answers over and over again: “the DevOps team didn’t get back to us fast enough”, or “the product manager didn’t tell us this feature was part of the MVP”.

This is when Jack realizes what is happening: by encouraging close relationships among his team members a little too much, he had accidentally isolated them from other teams, to the point that his employees had lost connection with the reality of the business, and had even developed some arrogance towards other functions. As a consequence, they were incapable of communicating efficiently with other departments, and this is why nothing was getting delivered on time.

Groupthink

Let’s consider now Noelle and her team. Like Jack, she knows both how to take care of the individual aspirations of her team members and how to build a close-knit team culture, which she does successfully. Unlike him though, she is also strives to build strong cross-department relationships, and her team members are not only getting along together, but also with other teams. Things are going so well that she is given additional budget to grow her team. She quickly starts interviewing people, and after seeing tens of candidates, she finally brings in a few more engineers. Of course, she gives a lot of attention to hiring people who are a perfect cultural fit, with similar habits and backgrounds; she hopes this will make their integration much easier and faster. A year later though, the performance of her team starts to drop, and she fails to understand why.

By her selection process, Noelle had in fact created a stale work environment where different ideas were discouraged, and the innovations that her team had been known for eventually stalled. In order to avoid this, it is critical for managers to remain open-minded and ensure diversity of thought within their team at all costs.

And this phenomenon is not limited to hiring: it can actually be observed whenever managers don’t go above and beyond to prevent groupthink on a daily basis. Even regular meetings, when not hosted properly, can also lead to groupthink if introverts give in to the strongest voices in the room instead of speaking up and sharing their own, unique ideas.

Happy individuals + united teams + collaborative organization = results: the winning equation

There is no question that teams are at the center of any successful organization: without united teams, businesses fail. However, forgetting about the other pieces of the puzzle in your leadership strategy will get you nowhere. So keep building happy teams and celebrating them, but not at the detriment of your people and your organization.