Improve Your Team by Getting Clear on Why the Team Exists
Randall Smith | March 2022
This is an excerpt from Breadth and Depth, the PowerLabs newsletter. Sign up below to get the next edition in your inbox.
I work with a lot of teams, and one of the recurring paradoxes is that the team members are often crystal clear on the purpose of the organization (win Medicare for All, win permanent protection for all undocumented immigrants, etc.), but there isn't a shared understanding of what the team is intended to accomplish and who it serves.
If the purpose of a team is fuzzy, the team members may pull in different directions and create a situation where the team's output is lesser than the sum of its parts.
The experience of delivering low-quality work can influence people's perception of the interpersonal dynamics in the group and lead them to conclude that poor performance is due to conflict, poor communication, or other group processes.
That conclusion may seem obvious, but empirical research suggests it may be wrong.
In their seminal article "A Theory of Team Coaching," Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman break it down:
The pervasive emphasis on interpersonal processes in the team performance literature reflects a logical fallacy about the role of those processes in shaping performance outcomes.
To illustrate, consider a team that is having performance problems. Such teams often exhibit interpersonal difficulties, such as communications breakdowns, conflict among members, leadership struggles, and so on.
Because both lay persons and scholars implicitly rely on an input-process-output framework in analyzing group dynamics, it is natural to infer that the observed interpersonal troubles are causing the performance problems and, therefore, that a good way to improve team performance would be to fix them.
As reasonable as this inference may seem, it is neither logical nor correct.
Although serious interpersonal conflicts sometimes do undermine team performance, it does not necessarily follow that the proper coaching intervention in such cases is to help members improve their interpersonal relationships.
In fact, research suggests that, in some circumstances, the causal arrow points in the opposite direction—that is, performance drives interpersonal processes (or, at least, perceptions of those processes) rather than vice versa.
For example, Staw gave task-performing teams false feedback about their performance and then asked members to provide "objective" descriptions of how members had interacted. Teams randomly assigned to the high performance condition reported more harmonious and better communications, among other differences, than did groups assigned to the low performance condition.
Doubt also is cast on interpersonal approaches to coaching by action research that seeks to improve team performance by improving the quality of members' interactions. Some of these studies use interventions based on the process consultation approach to coaching reviewed earlier; others employ a broader set of interventions that generally are referred to as team building or group development activities.
Although interventions that address members' relationships and interaction can be quite engaging and do affect members' attitudes, they do not reliably improve team performance.
Moreover, those experimental studies that have directly compared teams given task-focused and interpersonally focused interventions have found the former to significantly outperform the latter.
(Paragraph breaks added and citations removed to increase readability. The original is on pages 6–7 of the PDF.)
Instead of focusing on interpersonal processes, focus on interventions to improve the structure and conditions that drive behavior and impact team effectiveness. Learn more about how to improve team structure from this 90-minute webinar recording.
In the case of a team where people are all pulling in different directions, a written team purpose statement can help align efforts, increase the quality of motivation, and improve team outcomes.
The best purpose statements have a purpose that is challenging (a stretch, but not impossible), clear (conveys what it would look like to accomplish it), and consequential (has a meaningful impact on the lives and work of others).
Example team purpose statements
A chapter of an organization
[Team name's] purpose is to build a powerful legion of young people of color in [city] through:
Talking with people and bringing them into the organization through house meetings
Convening and activating people around issues they identify with and relate to
Collecting data on participation to enable learning and higher performance
Striving toward personal excellence in service of building power
to shift our political terrain toward [the organization's grand strategic objective].
The leadership team of an organization
[Team name] exists to serve our staff and members by:
Creating a diagnosis¹ that defines or explains the nature of the complex challenges that we face
Developing a guiding policy for dealing with challenges
Setting the innovation agenda for organization-wide initiatives
Developing and evaluating progress toward organization-wide objectives
so that our organization builds the strategic capacity required to win [our grand strategic objective].
The first phase of the leadership team of a coalition
This team exists to provide the leadership to launch a new coalition to win the passage of legislation that will allow undocumented immigrants to access driver's licenses by:
Identifying and recruiting other leaders from key constituencies
Engaging others in developing priorities about initial projects that
build on work that is already occurring;
create a shared understanding of what it will take to win; and
build capacity to do more by forming additional leadership teams
So that undocumented immigrants will be able to go about their daily lives with less risk of detention and deportation and live with less fear.
The format is:
This team's unique added value
3–5 of this team's activities
So that (the impact of the team on the organization, stakeholders, or the world)
The purpose statement should be clear about ends — what the team intends to accomplish — and leaves plenty of room for the team to choose the means to reach those ends.
Creating a compelling purpose is simple, but it is not easy; defining the purpose of a team requires making hard choices and limiting courses of action. I've also seen team's struggle to define their purpose — especially senior leadership teams — because the individuals have to reconceptualize their role and responsibilities in the organization.
People may not like making a choice, but research suggests that a team is more likely to be effective once the choice has been made.
² This is based on Richard Rumelt’s concept of a strategy kernel from Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters.
Good strategy has a basic underlying logic: coherent action backed up by an argument, an effective mixture of thought and action. I call this basic underlying structure the kernel. A good strategy may consist of more than the kernel, but if the kernel is absent or misshapen, then there is a serious problem. The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: (1) a diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge, (2) a guiding-policy for dealing with the challenge, and (3) a set of coherent-actions that are designed to carry out the guiding-policy. [Ch. 5, “The Kernel”]
Related resources
What I learned building self-managing teams of volunteers at Sunrise Movement
[6 minute read]
Read this post for three lessons to create healthy volunteer teams.
Behind the scenes of Sunrise Movement’s volunteer-led phone bank program
[90 minute video or 18 minute read]
Watch the webinar recording or read this post to learn how Sunrise structured volunteer teams to make them more likely to produce excellent results and contribute to the growth and learning of the team members.
Reflections on Sunrise Movement’s strike circle program
[50 minute video and 7 minute read]
Watch this webinar recording to learn how Sunrise created hundreds of teams of young people who organized climate strikes on their campuses.
Designing powerful teams
[90 minute video]
Watch this recording of Ruth Wageman, one of the leading experts on team effectiveness and author of “Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great,” to learn how you can design a team so that the team gets stronger over time, contributes to the growth and learning of team members and produces excellent work.
Talk about fears and feelings to improve your team
[4 minute read]
Learn a simple exercise for teams to discuss fears and feelings to strengthen trust, head off relationship conflict, increase learning and improve project outcomes.