Is Team a Fruit Salad or a Fruit Juice?

Team Building and Management Series - 1

I thought of writing an article series on Team Building and Management. But then I was wondering, is there anything new to write about? Are there any new insights which can revolutionize the way we look at teams? And to my surprise, I realized that there are more to discuss and learn about building and managing teams.

But first things first. Let’s try to understand what is a team and how a team is unique. Though this has been done very many times, I want to do it again due to two reasons. First, after so much effort, “Team” is the most misused concept in the modern workplace. Second, many definitions do not give an idea which majority understands. I have seen many organizations have so-called “Teams”, but they are nothing like a team. Commonly we create a “Group” and label them as “Teams”. So what’s the difference?

Let me ask this, what’s the difference between a fruit juice and a fruit salad? Will you agree with the following?

I believe that a Team is like a Fruit juice while a Group is like a Fruit salad. Blending we do to convert a fruit salad into a fruit juice is the Team building process.

If you again look at what blending do, you will see that it cuts, chops and squeezes individual fruits to reshape themselves. By blending, you enable fruits to ignore their individuality and adopt a flavor, texture, and fragrance which is a mix of all.

As a result of this, you get the synergy, efficiency and all other benefits of a team. Hence a team can be viewed as follows;

Collection of individuals with a complete and adequate set of skills to achieve a specific goal, working above and beyond individuality to achieve a common team identity.

In simplest of forms “Team is a fruit juice, not a fruit salad”

Let’s get this further clarified;

• Collection of Individuals: At the core, all teams are made up of individuals. All individuals are driven by their personal ambitions. We should not forget and most importantly we should not expect individuals to forget or sacrifice their individual goals for the team. It will happen rarely. What you should do instead is to create a reciprocal system. Following is a representation of such system (See the Figure Below).
• Complete and adequate set of skills: Teams should be created with a specific goal in mind. Normally such goals require a set of skills to successfully complete the goal. Also, teamwork demands another set of skills. A team should be having all the skills needed to achieve the goal successfully. Also, the team members should be at the right skill level when the team attempts to achieve the goal(s). Note that, I didn’t tell that the right level needs to be achieved right at the beginning. Skills may not be at the optimum when the individuals get together but need to be at the optimum level when they perform as a team.
• Team Identity: Team will have a unique identity which is a mix of all member identities. This is like a newborn baby having a mix of identities of both of their parents.

Many efforts to create successful teams fail because they fail to fulfill one of these three requirements.

Yet these are not the only factors causing the teams to fail. Many articles I have read, talk about many common factors such as leadership, team competencies. But I have identified there are many other hidden factors causing the teams to fail.

We will discuss the Iceberg of team failure in our next article of the series.