The 5-Minute Manager - How to Organize your Team

Why teams fail

Team organization has not changed much since the 1960s, with teams continuing to fail due to common dysfunctions – with the most common dysfunction being traditional team management which still dominates today's organisations. Research by Deloittes confirms that managers who move from a traditional hierarchical mindset to a transformational one achieve substantially greater results, including things like greater productivity, increased team member job satisfaction and less stress for everyone. How you as a manager see and relate to your team is the single most significant determinant of how well team training works.

Below are images of the traditional and transformational team structures.

Six other common team dysfunctions cause teams to fail. The first is that team members do not fully understand each other. The second is a lack of open communication characterized by team members not understanding how to conduct a conversation or resolve conflict. The third is the lack of a common team vision, a common goal to direct all of the teams’ activities. The fourth is a lack of team-level planning, a team master plan. The fifth is no clearly defined roles and accountabilities, and the sixth is that teams fail when mutual accountability is absent.

This training program addresses each of these dysfunctions.

Ordinary Teams

Ordinary teams are structured as traditional hierarchical teams and grouped by skill sets. Some hierarchy is needed to identify who is in charge, who is the team leader, who is senior, rank and, in some cases, privilege, but these also impose inequality on the team. These concepts are now outdated and have no place in contemporary settings; today’s workforce (made up primarily of Millennials) resent these concepts and refuses to accept them.

Traditional or ordinary teams tend to operate as silos: -1. Individual team members do not share their experience or knowledge with others, and 2. The team does not integrate or cooperate well with other teams. Ordinary teams respond to a mandate from outside their team, making them entirely internally focused, with managers being the ones who provide clarity and direction. In an ordinary team, the manager is the backbone of the team and functions as the support system for teamwork and collaboration. In a ship analogy, managers are the people with their eyes on the horizon; managers are the ones reading the map. As a manager of an ordinary team, you are the one plotting the course and showing your team members how you will get there.

The High-Performance Team

In high-performance teams, all team members are considered to be equal; there are no distinctions about seniority or privilege. A way of describing this to team members is to say that everyone is of equal value; everyone simply has a different job based on different experiences and knowledge. In this respect, a high-performance team is flat and non-hierarchal. A team leader is still in charge but shares the team leadership. Using the ship analogy again, in a high-performance team, the whole team would be reading the map and determining the ship’s direction.

You do not need to change the team’s hierarchy; after all, you still need to show who is in charge. What is important, however, from this point on is how you think about your team. High-performance team members need to have complete autonomy and empowerment; they need to feel that they can express their views without fear of retribution or ridicule; they need to decide rules of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour; overall, they need to rise up to a higher level of professionalism.

Try to think of your team as a high-performance team where everyone is equal in status and value. Think of team members as having different jobs, backgrounds, experiences, knowledge, skills, and strengths. Thinking this way will make the lessons that follow easier to understand and put into practice.

What do today’s Employees want?

Today's Millennial generation, unlike the Baby Boomers before them, are vocal about what they want their workplace to look like; they will not accept old-style traditional management methods, which they view as managing, administering, stifling, unreasonable and unwarranted. They want managers who recognize them for their efforts and who work in a collaborative, supportive and motivational manner.

Today’s employees care deeply about diversity and do not want to be treated as employees but as colleagues or partners. They believe (foolishly) that they should be promoted every two years, regardless of performance and want to feel (reasonably) that they have an open and honest relationship with their manager and co-workers. They want to know that their opinion is valued and receive a good deal of feedback 

The more their manager creates shared goals, the more they will feel a sense of being part of an ‘in group’. That’s important to today’s employees because they believe it creates more accurate sharing of information, better collaboration, and motivation. They are passionate about autonomy, they love it when they have choices, for them it creates a sense of having more meaningful work making them feel more in control.

They will not accept toxic behaviours from their bosses such as playing favourites, bullying or managers who abuse their position to gain monetary or sexual rewards, these are deeply disliked.

Finally, they want a say in how their workplace is managed, where free-thinking, empowerment and service and community are put ahead of self-interest. The combination of a progressive management style and being a member of a high-performance team are perfect for them, these fulfil their willingness and desire to work across teams, as well as their constant need for feedback, reinforcement, and praise for being tech-savvy. No matter how they are viewed, the simple truth is that today’s employees look at work dramatically differently from the Baby Boomer generation that preceded them.

Management and TeamsRussell FutcherHow to Organize your Team