Learning Team Toolkit

Who's to Blame?

When something goes wrong in our organizations, the most common response is to find someone to blame. That makes things simple and easy. If we can put the finger on the particular someone who messed up, we can go back to doing what we were doing without feeling guilty.

The problem is, of course, that it’s not nearly that simple or easy. If we were really to understand the situation in all its complexity, we would usually see that no one person is or could be responsible for the failure. There’s a saying in the quality improvement field that “every process is perfectly designed to achieve the results it is achieving.” This is what Peter Senge was writing about in The Fifth Discipline, his now-classic book about the Learning Organization, when he made the point that “structure determines behavior.” What Senge meant is that when things are structured in certain ways, the results produced will tend to be the same irrespective of who’s in charge or charged with carrying out the task.

When Bad Teams Happen to Good People (with apologies to Rabbi Kushner)

When teams fail in our organizations, we do the same thing. We look around for people or things to blame. People didn’t carry their weight. The meetings were a waste of time. We couldn’t get past the conflicts. We didn’t know what we were supposed to do. Management won’t pay any attention to the recommendations anyhow, so why bother. The truth is that when teams fail, the fault often rests with a flawed process for getting them started. We might argue that it is “management’s” fault because “they” haven’t designed an effective process. But, don’t we, as team members, also share responsibility for making our teams successful? By learning the process ourselves, we can go a long way toward building effective teams.

The First Step to Team Success

So what is this first and most important step for creating effective teams? It’s called “Chartering.” Chartering is the process by which the team is formed, its mission or task described, its resources allocated, its goals set, its membership committed, and its plans made. It is the process of “counting the costs” that it will take for a team to achieve its goals and deciding whether the organization is really committed to getting there. A good charter creates a recipe or roadmap for the team as it carries out its charge. It helps members move far more quickly past the “storming” and “norming” phases of the group process and get to the “performing” stage. It can be crucial in helping the group deal with the natural kinds of conflict that can arise at any stage of the team’s life. Moreover, it can assist in facilitating the learning of the team and its members as they work to improve the effectiveness of this and future team efforts.

There’s a fairly simple logic to building a team charter. Ask yourself questions about all the various conditions, resources, attitudes, and behaviors that will be required in order for the team to accomplish its goals—and answer them. Here’s a list of some of the most important questions:

1. What is the purpose for creating the team? Research on team effectiveness concludes that the most important contributing factor is a clear and elevating goal. Further, the relationship between goal setting and task performance is probably the most robust finding in the research literature of the behavioral sciences. The more completely the purpose of the team can be identified, the more likely management, team members, and the rest of the organization will support it in accomplishing its objectives.
2. What kind of team is needed? One mistake people often make is thinking that a team is just a team. There are different kinds of teams for different kinds of goals. Is the team meant to accomplish a task, manage or improve a process, come up with a new product idea or design, solve a problem, or make a decision?
3. Will the team be manager led or self-managed? Who, if anyone, is in charge? That will depend on the task and the maturity of the members. If it is self-managed or leaderless, who will be responsible for facilitating the team’s progress toward its goal?
4. What skills are needed to accomplish the goal? An inventory of critical knowledge and expertise should be undertaken. It is essential those teams have as members, or have access to others who can be ad hoc resources, and who can supply the necessary competence to achieve the objectives.
5. How will members be selected? This is more difficult than it might seem. Often there are internal political, logistical or deployment barriers. We want the right balance of thinkers and doers. We want people who will follow through. We want to use known resources but develop new competence in the organization. We want enough diversity of opinion to get all the “cards on the table” without creating unnecessary conflict. How will the personalities of the various players fit? Can the company afford to have them take time away from other priorities? Bad choices here can doom the results.
6. What resources will be necessary to achieve the objectives? Is management willing to devote the time as well as the financial, human and intellectual capital necessary to get the job done? Counting the costs and deciding that it is worth those costs is crucial. In self-managed or leaderless teams (such as UOPhx Learning Teams), these are questions that need to be answered by team members both individually and collectively. Are they willing to commit their time, talents, and effort to that goal to the extent necessary?
7. What are the boundaries? Management needs to identify the parameters within which the team is expected to operate. How much time will the team be given? How often are the members expected to meet? What is the scope of their concern? (It’s sometimes useful when creating process improvement teams to identify change recommendations that are off-limits. For example, it is common for teams to come back with a recommendation that more staff is the solution. By limiting such recommendations, at least at first, the team is forced to look for solutions that deal more with the process.)
8. What process will the team use to get results? Once the team has been formed and the members selected, management—and especially the team itself—must determine how it will go about getting the job done. This is the “ground rule” phase and involves deliberately taking charge of the “norming” process. When and where will the team meet? How will it meet (face-to-face or some kind of virtual arrangement)? What maintenance roles will the members agree are important and how will they assign those? How will the members communicate with one another? What happens if a member can’t be at a meeting but has an assignment due? What are expectations regarding participation in meetings?
9. How will we secure equal commitment? A frank discussion about the level of commitment members are willing to give is the key to achieving success. Do they share an equal view as to the importance of the goal? Are they personally willing to expend the effort necessary to get the desired result? What circumstances might limit their ability to perform up to the expectations of others? Getting all this out on the table early on can avoid conflicts down the road.
10. How will we plan for conflict? Section Five in our toolkit deals with decision-making and conflict resolution. The best way to minimize the amount of unproductive conflict is to conduct a frank discussion about potential discord. Two of the most common examples of conflict in teams result when members don’t pull their weight and follow through on assignments and commitments, or when one or more members try to over-control and dominate the group. By identifying these and other potential conflicts and agreeing beforehand how members will deal with them, a team can minimize the disruption to goal achievement. In essence, you’re giving one another permission to do the kind of confrontation that is necessary to get past the conflict
11. What will we do to get the job done? The Project Plan: Early on, there’s a need to analyze the task, break down tasks, establish the timeline, make and accept assignments, and get started. Usually, we make this the first step but it’s really the final step of the “chartering” process.
12. How will we evaluate our success and learn from the process? How will we know what mid-course corrections need to be made to the process or plan? How will we measure our progress? What can we do to learn from this experience about how not only to make this team better, but future teams: both those we serve on individually and teams the company forms. By planning how and when the team will reflect on the process they are going or have gone through, the individuals, team, and larger organization benefit.

There is a direct proportional relationship between the amount of time and intellectual effort we spend chartering our teams and the likelihood those teams will achieve their goals. Going about this process in a conscious, reflective manner often is the deciding factor in achieving optimal results.