Ken Thompson reminds us that teamwork is an exercise in understanding the players, goals, constraints, and the task at hand — and making sure they all are aligned in the same direction. He offers a quick team profile checklist to see where the team and the task may be out of whack, focusing on eight areas:
- Nature of Team Objective
- Team Leadership/Management Style
- Team Member Profile
- Team Shape
- Team Environment
- Team Working Approach
- Team Social Dynamic
- Team Technology Factor
He also quotes Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, writing in the Harvard Business Review, who identified three types of teams, each requiring a different communications and control strategy to move them forward:
- Recommender Teams: those that recommend things — task forces or project groups (often part-time; great for reviewing work but can lack a “team engine” for getting detailed work done).
- Doer Teams: those that make or do things — manufacturing, operations, or marketing groups (great for doing things, but their networks may be limited to their own functional areas which can blind them to some innovation and cross-functional opportunities).
- Managing Teams: those that run things — groups that oversee some significant functional activity (often staffed with senior executives who have serious time management challenges and are unlikely to engage with traditional team communication and meeting approaches).
NOTE: The title of this weblog entry comes from a favorite ”demotivation” poster from Despair.com. Or, try this one on group behavior, or this one on teamwork, or maybe this one on the benefits of ignorance.
