DYSFUNCTIONAL TEAMS

When companies and organisations fail they are almost always lacking in effective teamwork.

This truth is usually revealed to me when i work with organisations – they are not functioning effectively together as a team.

In fact they are often quite dysfunctional. The politics of the office and the organisation can make it easy to focus on individual success rather than the team achieving their desired goal.

For a group of people to be truly described as a team they must overcome these five key team dysfunctions:

• Absence of Trust ~ this stems from peoples unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group. Team members who are not genuinely open with another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation of trust. They hesitate to ask for help, are unwilling to take feedback and avoid team meetings.

• Fear of Conflict ~ teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unflltered and passionate debate of business ideas. Instead they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments. They have boring meetings, create an environment where personal attacks and political back stabbing thrive, ignore critical issues which need to be addressed and  fail to tap into all the opinions available

• Lack of Commitment ~ without having aired their opinions in the course of open and passionate debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy in and commit to decisions, though they may feign agreement during meetings. This means there no real direction about where the team are going and what the priorities are, they over analyse and procrastinate, revisit the same discussions regularly, breed a lack of confidence and fear of failure, ,iss lots of business opportunities

• Avoidance of Accountability ~ without committing to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers out on actions and behaviors which are counterproductive to the good of the team. This creates resentment among team members who have different standards of performance, encourages mediocrity, miss deadlines and key deliveribles regularly, expect the team leader to be sole source of discipline

•  Inattention to Results ~ team members put their individual needs or perhaps their departments above the collective goals of the team. Members stagnate and fail to grow, lose motivation, become easily distracted, divert attention to individual goals and careers, rarely achieve desired team results

If you can see any of these five dysfunctions in your team then you need to speak to Peter Nolan about how he can help build your group of people into a high performance team.