If you have concerns about the performance of a particular team, whether that is your management team or an individual functional team, this is what you should do about it.
Step 1: Investigate
First, investigate what is going on. Establish what the issues are and what unhelpful behaviour is undermining performance. This is akin to a doctor asking a patient about their symptoms.
The key questions to ask include:
- Is there poor leadership or poor organisation within the team?
- Are people clear on their roles within the team?
- Are team members interacting as they should be within the team?
- Are team members interacting as they should be with people outside the team?
- Does the team have the right priorities?
- Are any conflicts within the team well managed? This includes personal conflicts, conflicts in working styles and conflicts in priorities.
- If there are conflicts, do they affect the team generally or do they revolve around certain individuals?
- Is the issue with the day-to-day functions of the team, or is it in other areas, such as innovation and business development?
- Are team members clear on how they need to interact with each other? Are they clear on their role in expanding and developing the business?
Step 2: Diagnose
The second step, armed with this information, is to diagnose what the underlying problem might be – just as a doctor makes a provisional diagnosis based on the information he gathers from the client.
The three most likely issues to arise with a team are:
- poor team leadership
- poor teamwork
- insularity and inability to work well with other parts of the organisation.
Poor team leadership manifests itself in a number of ways. The most obvious signs are poor organisation and poor motivation. In terms of day-to-day activities, people do not know what they should be doing, what their priorities should be and how their work fits in with what the rest of the team is doing. This, in turn, affects morale.
A team with poor leadership will be struggling with day-to-day tasks and will not be thinking about the future. There will be little innovation or development.
As a side note, it is worth remembering that good leadership does not always have to come from the nominated team leader. Different team members may lead on particular tasks and high performance teams tend to motivate and guide themselves with little need of a formal leader.
Poor teamwork is a slightly vague term. It describes both the situation in which team members do not work well together and also the consequences of this – disorganisation and lack of coordination that in turn lead to poor team performance.
We shall focus here on the various causes that lead to poor teamwork and unsatisfactory outcomes.
The fist potential cause is poor leadership. When poor leadership is the cause of poor teamwork then typically no team members will stand out as being “part of the problem”. They will usually have good attitudes and be willing to work with others but will just lack direction.
The second potential cause of poor teamwork is a lack of skill or awareness. Some team members may have little ability to coordinate their activities with others. They may only just be able to keep up with their own work load and so find it too difficult to keep an eye on what others around them are doing. They may not have the skill to adapt their own way of working to fit in with those around them. They may lack the awareness of what is going on in the rest of the team, or not realise that they are part of a system.
In instances such as these, training and upskilling is usually the answer – and certainly something that should be tried in the first instance.
The third potential cause of poor teamwork is unhelpful attitudes and behaviours within the team. There may be uncooperative and entrenched attitudes by one or more team members. Some people can almost delight in being disruptive and other people simply refuse to adapt their own way of working to fit in with the team’s activities.
In these instances it is worth looking a bit deeper to see what is driving the uncooperative behaviour. It could be caused by unaddressed issues, such as an underlying resentment on the part of one or more individuals. A particular individual may simply be “difficult” – and has probably been allowed to get away with poor behaviour for a considerable length of time.
Such behaviour can also be driven by a corporate culture that encourages antagonism or that emphasises individualism over teamwork. Companies that deliberately create internal competition between colleagues are in danger of encouraging such attitudes.
Insularity: Sometimes a team will work well as an isolated unit but will be poor at working externally with other teams or individuals inside or outside the organisation. This can be the result of a lack of skill in liaising, poor attitudes (similar to those described above) or a corporate culture that encourages insularity and working in silos.
Whenever there is an issue within a team it is worth considering whether the team leader should have been able to deal with it. If the answer to that question is yes, then clearly leadership questions need to be addressed alongside any underlying issues.
Step 3: Verify
Once you have established what the issues are and have diagnosed what you think the root problem is, it is best to pause and to see whether you can verify that your assumptions are correct.
If you think that the issue is, for example, poor leadership or poor teamwork by one or more team members, can you find any other evidence of this? Can you triangulate by getting the views of others who see those individuals from a very different perspective? Do these individuals have recognised “blind spots” that have been identified by previous bosses or in annual reviews?
As well as looking for evidence to back up your theory you should also look for evidence that you are wrong. For example, perhaps you believe that Team A is slowing up your operations because they are poor at liaising with Team B and Team C. In that case you should also seek evidence that you might be wrong and that the problem actually lies with Team B or Team C.
Step 4: Take Action
Once you are as sure as you can be that you have identified the root cause of the problem it is time to take decisive action.
Of course, the appropriate action will depend on the nature of the underlying issue. Some issues call for intervention on a personal level and others require a team wide solution.
Where an issue such as poor leadership, lack of skills or poor attitudes lies with one or two clearly identifiable individuals then this can be addressed directly with those individuals. You need to be very clear about the nature of the problem, about what you want them to change, about how you are going to measure that change, about the expected timescale for change and about the consequences for failing to change.
To put that another way, you need to set SMART goals with a clear set of outcomes depending on whether or not those goals are met.
At the same time, appropriate support should be provided to help those individuals to achieve that change. It is usually far more effective if people feel that they are being helped to improve rather than feeling that they have received a final warning and are already half way out of the organisation. It is also better for team morale if the team feels that it (or its members) are being helped to succeed rather than set up to fail.
Issues that are not confined to particular individuals require a different approach.
If the team simply does not gel together then some team coaching might be useful as a first step. If that does not work then some team reorganisation might be required. This might involve putting stronger team members in a position where they can help weaker members, or it might involve fundamentally re-engineering how the team works.
A more drastic solution might be to introduce a more directive approach to team leadership for a while with much closer supervision of staff. This is rarely popular as people do not like to be micro-managed, but it can be effective if done for a short period of time. Ideally, targets should be set that would allow the team to get out from under the burden of close supervision if those targets are met. This shared goal may itself help to unify the team.
If the issue involves the management team, external help is likely to be required.
If the underlying issue is one that revolves around the corporate culture, such as a culture that encourages individuals or teams to operate independently and not cooperate with each other, then a company-wide approach is probably required (unless the team in question has a very distinct culture all of its own). There are so many potential corporate culture issues that it is impossible to give any recommendation as to what to do in a brief article, but some suggestions will be found in our article on how to change culture and behaviours: https://aletheian.co.uk/how-do-you-change-your-corporate-culture/.
Anthony Saint is Co-Founder of Aletheian Advisors and writes regularly on corporate strategy and corporate culture.
