You Have a Teamwork Problem

Why most teams underperform and how even good teams can be better

Most organizations say teamwork matters. It’s posted as one of their values. Leaders extol collaboration. When a difficult problem arises, the response is often to assemble a team, task force, or committee to solve it.

And yet there is a remarkable disconnect: We depend on teams to produce results, but we rarely manage the capability of teams with the same discipline applied to almost everything else in the business.

Ask a senior leader about revenue, margins, customer retention, headcount, or strategic priorities, and the answers are usually close at hand. Then ask:

• How many teams are operating across your organization?

• Which ones are truly high performing and which are merely functioning?

• Which are tolerating friction that slows or distorts decisions, exhausts their best people, and quietly undermines performance?

Most organizations simply do not know. That is the organizational blind spot.

And this isn't just about dysfunctional teams. Even good teams can get better. The question is whether you have a systematic way to know where the opportunities are.

THE WORK OF ORGANIZATIONS IS DONE BY TEAMS

We tend to tell the story of organizational success through individuals. The visionary CEO. The brilliant founder. The exceptional executive. The transformational leader. But organizations do not execute strategies. Teams do.

Teams design the product, serve the customer, operate the facility, solve the problem, manage the project, make the decisions, and turn an idea into a result. As psychologist Robert Hogan observed, significant human achievement is fundamentally a collective effort.

That creates an interesting contradiction. Organizations invest enormous amounts of money developing individual leaders while investing comparatively little in developing the teams those leaders are responsible for building. We teach leaders to think strategically, communicate effectively, manage performance, and lead change. Far less often do we systematically teach them how to build a team that can think, decide, communicate, execute, and learn together. And then we wonder why exceptional individual talent does not always produce exceptional organizational performance.

HIGH-PERFORMING TEAMS ARE THE EXCEPTION

Here is the uncomfortable conversation I often have with leaders: You say your team is high performing. How do you know? Not whether you like one another. Not whether the business is currently hitting its numbers. Not whether the meetings are generally pleasant. How do you actually know?

After studying and working with thousands of teams, Dr. Gordon Curphy concluded that genuinely high-performing teams are far less common than leaders tend to believe. His work also suggests that organizations consistently underestimate how much opportunity exists to improve them.

That matters because business results can disguise team problems for a long time. A strong market can compensate for weak execution. A few exceptional people can carry an average team. A dominant product can conceal poor collaboration. A heroic leader can personally compensate for unclear roles and weak accountability. Until they cannot.

The scoreboard tells you how the business is performing. It does not necessarily tell you whether the team producing those results is performing anywhere near its potential.

TEAM BUILDING IS NOT THE SAME AS BUILDING A TEAM

Part of the problem is what we have come to call “team building.” Take the team off-site. Run a personality assessment. Do an icebreaker. Go through a ropes course. Have dinner together. Spend the day assembling bicycles for underprivileged children.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those activities. They may improve relationships, create energy, and help people know one another better. But healthier relationships alone do not necessarily produce better teamwork. A team struggling with unclear priorities does not primarily need a scavenger hunt. A team with poorly defined decision rights does not primarily need to fill out personality profiles. A team that cannot resolve competing customer demands does not need another retreat.

Teams get better by getting better at their real work. They improve when they clarify context and priorities. When they confront the conversations they have been avoiding. When roles and decision authority become explicit. When expectations and operating norms are agreed upon. When meetings improve. When handoffs become cleaner. When accountability becomes normal rather than uncomfortable. When the team pauses long enough to learn from what just happened.

That should change how we think about team development. The objective is not to take people away from the work to “work on the team.” The opportunity is to improve the team while it is doing the work.

THE MISSING LEADERSHIP SKILL

For decades, organizations have searched for the attributes that distinguish exceptional leaders. Intelligence. Judgment. Trustworthiness. Positive energy. Emotional intelligence. Strategic thinking. Communication. Executive presence. All matter.

But I believe another capability deserves far more attention: the ability to build and lead a high-performing team.

Consider the leverage. A talented individual can improve his or her own performance. A talented team leader can improve the performance of eight, twelve, or twenty people. A company filled with leaders who know how to consistently build better teams can change the performance of an entire organization. That is not another leadership competency to add to a crowded list. It is an organizational capability.

The good news is that the ability to build teams can be developed. Leaders can learn how to accurately assess how their teams are functioning. They can learn where the greatest opportunities exist. They can develop the skills to facilitate difficult conversations, establish better operating norms, create clarity, strengthen trust, and improve execution. And organizations can develop a standard approach so every leader is not inventing teamwork from scratch.

THE HIDDEN OPPORTUNITY

The goal is not to turn every team into an elite team. Some teams simply do not require it. The goal is to stop leaving team performance to chance.

Imagine an organization where leaders at every level know how to build healthier, more aligned, higher-performing teams. Where teams develop an igniting vision, operational trust, and positive energy. Where they continually improve how they think, collaborate, decide, communicate, execute, and learn together. Where leaders receive feedback not only on their individual leadership performance, but on the health and effectiveness of the teams they lead. Where team improvement becomes part of how work gets done rather than something reserved for an annual off-site.

Eventually, something even more powerful begins to happen. You consistently create higher performing teams that, together, become a high-performing organization. A team of teams.

So perhaps the next time your organization discusses leadership development, there is a question worth putting on the table: Have we invested in our leaders’ ability to assess, build, and continuously improve the teams they lead?

Ultimately, the work of organizations is done by teams. And the performance of the organization will never consistently exceed the capability of the teams doing the work.

So where do you start?

Not with another organization-wide initiative. Start with one team.

Next week, I'll share a practical approach for doing exactly that.