When does a group of people become a team?

Just like everybody with a camera can call him- or herself a photographer nowadays, every group of people can call themselves a team. It is not a protected title which is earned after a proven level of mastery and is therefore bound to own interpretation. I personally think it is one of the most misused terms in business.

We group everybody within the same budget, give them a coffee machine, tell people to cooperate and focus and we expect them to become a 'winning' or 'high performing' team, whatever that may be. Sounds familiar? I think there is more to it, to becoming a team, and I'd like to share my 3 key ingredients of a team.

Common goals and no conflicting individual goals

Every team in business has multiple goals. Typically we want change (short term) while maintaining things like continuity (long term). Continuity is not just a working system, but also knowledgeable people maintaining the system Therefore you train people and try to keep them onboard for a longer period of time. The management term 'focus' often implies limiting yourself to short term goals. This will likely come at the cost of long term goals, which is the reason I have allergic reactions when this term is used.

A soccer team you might say, has only 1 goal: winning. The difference with a business is that soccer has agreed upon objectives, rules and time. Business is an infinite game without objectives, rules or time limitations. The goal of business is to stay in the game. This is basic game theory, if you are interested please read "The infinite game" from Simon Sinek.

More often we have multiple shortterm goals and due to a lack of priorities we divide them across the teammembers. In order to make sure these goals are all met, we incentivize them e.g. with a bonus. You can then say goodbye to cooperation, because success is now determined by meeting individual goals. This also implies half of the team can be successful and half of the team can fail at the same time. Imagine how that would look like in a soccer game. The strikers celebrating their 3 goals while the defenders mourn about their 4 counter goals.

There is no 'I' in a team. You fail together and you celebrate together. All business goals should be common goals where the whole team feels responsible together to achieve them. This is independent from skills and competences, because if we take responsibility as a team, we will go beyond our comfort zone to achieve these goals. In great soccer teams, you always see strikers assist the defense, even though they are much less capable. In addition, individual goals will always exist. Like learning new skills, a career path etc.. Although a balance with individual goals is often needed to achieve proper intrinsic motivation, it should never fully conflict with common team goals.

A diverse group where everybody embraces it's diversity

After determining your goals as a team, you need to give the means to the team to achieve this goal. Being independent within reasonable terms, implying having all required skills to accomplish the goals. However, it is often inevitable to have some dependencies with other teams.

Required skills often requires a few seniors in different areas. Diversity goes beyond having the available skills. A well balanced mix of seniority is just as important. Too many seniors will often result in many discussions and people not willing to pick up the 'easy' work. Too many juniors will often result in lower quality of the work or spending more time training then adding short-term value to the organization. There are many more characteristics to diversify a team. I wouldn't want to have a team without:

• A positive/energetic person who lifts up the sprit
• A person who has a big network within the organization, who can point you to the right person for any question
• A person who can remain calm in stressful situations
• A person who can challenge the team to pursue bigger goals
• A person who has a good helicopter view of the situation, being able to navigate the team and align with the people around the team
• A person who is into the details, with some constructive nitpicking skills to keep everybody sharp

A team with the right diversity is a good start, but utterly useless if the team doesn't understand it's diversity, it's benefits and embraces it. It's easy to blame a helicopter person for not understanding the details, to blame a calm person for not being 'involved', a network person to be distracted by people or a junior for not delivering enough value. Only when the team looks beyond individual performance and sees how everybody is contributing to the collective in different ways, the benefits are reaped.

No hierarchy in the team, but organic leadership

Although characteristics and salary will always be diverse in the team, I would never recommend an assigned hierarchy within the team. I want to have leaders in the team, preferably as many as there are teammembers. A common misconception is however that leaders can be appointed. Leadership is simply the act of having people who believe what you believe and who unforcefully decide to follow you. When people understand how your diverse set of characteristics benefit the team, they will decide to follow you on related topics. Leadership also changes on a regular basis, based on knowledge, on the mood, on the topics and availability of teammembers.

There are multiple benefits to having, as I prefer to call it, organic leadership in the team. Utilizing the knowledge of the collective to determine the path is always more powerful then using the knowledge of a single person. No matter how smart a single person is. In addition, when a single person determines a path, you easily fall into the trap of making a split between thinking and doing. This did enable the industrial revolution, but within current creative and complex environments, it would lead to 'spoon feeding'. The goal of every teammember should be obtain the empathy to fully understand the needs of the person who benefits from the value he/she delivers. Being limited to just doing the work will remove any incentive to understand why you are doing what you are doing.

As many companies are figuring out now with most of their colleagues working from home, people can take more responsibility then they anticipated. You don't need to have 'manager' or 'director' in your title to be able to take responsibility. Taking responsibility is actually motivating people, because it means they are trusted and can make a bigger impact. In addition, it takes the weight of the shoulders of people who never reasonably expected to take all this responsibility, giving them the opportunity to take some days of or report ill.

So these are my key ingredients to becoming a team, starting as a group of people. What is your recipe?