Last time, I said a team's working agreement gets tested fast, and that the check-in is where the truth shows up. So let me tell you about the truth that showed up in a team I worked with before. The agreement itself was perfectly reasonable:
Everyone had nodded along when drafting it, but then nobody did any of it.
When we dug into why, there was not one reason but a pile of them, and here is the uncomfortable part: every single one was rational.
And underneath all of those sat the quiet one:
Is this even a team, or just the people that an org structure decision happened to place into one room?
The senior members sat in our meetings while secretly thinking, my real team is the one I am the leader of. At the working level, these colleagues each had their own individual tasks and could not quite see how group sharing was relevant to their role.
Of course, nobody said any of this out loud. They simply went quiet in the meetings, and while the meetings kept going, it felt a bit like a slow death each time. Sure, each person's physical attendance was mandatory, however - their mental attention was not. In a sense, despite the fact that team belonging raises engagement and motivation, people chose to feel "team-less" instead.
If you are wondering just how invisible the gain of being in the team was, let me share an example. At an offsite, I ran the classic Lost at Sea exercise. You rank fifteen salvaged items on your own, then again as a group, and both scores get compared against the expert answer. The entire point is that groups outperform individuals.
Every single group did worse together than alone. This is normal and happens about half of the time. In a sense, it showcases that optimal team work isn't there YET. But this time, the reflection from this team was different. Nobody connected the result to how they had worked together. Nobody said "we did not really listen to each other." The conclusion in the room was, more or less: "well, apparently we all suck at surviving in the ocean."
They could not see the gain of being a team even when an exercise was built to show them exactly that. And that was the moment I understood: the problem was never the behaviors in the team's working agreement. It was that nobody believed there was anything to gain from each other in the first place.
This is what we get backwards. An agreement lists behaviors, but every one of those behaviors takes effort. Asking a question in someone else's topic, sharing an idea before it is polished, staying engaged in a long meeting: this requires intentional effort. And we humans only make an effort when we can see a point to it. If nobody feels there is anything to gain from each other, there is no point, so the effort just never happens. We attend, we nod, we keep the artificial harmony.
Previously, I wrote about the importance of every member in a team not acting as a bystander. They can shift the energy and I do stand by this point. But team identity is different. A "team-less" team cannot be expected to invent its own reason to become a team.
Ask people on a strong team why it works, and sooner or later they point to the leader who brought them together. Ask a checked-out team why they cannot be bothered, and they point to a leader too. The vision of what a team could become is initially created by the team leader, or it is not made at all.
So if the group you lead is quietly team-less, the first work is yours to reflect on:
What identity do I want this team to have? What would these people actually gain from each other if this worked?
If you cannot answer these two questions, no offsite will save you and your team.
And once you can answer, resist the urge to announce it. A vision declared is just another agreement for the team to nod at. Your conviction tells you where to point the group, but they have to find it for themselves, and it tends to hide inside the questions too big for anyone to answer alone. For this team I worked with, it turned out to be: how do we truly understand the business we serve? No one function owned it. No one person could answer it. Working on it together was where the team began to feel like a team.
How I engineered that discovery, what it rebuilt, and what it requires of the leader, is where I am going next.
If this has sparked some curiosity, I would love to continue the conversation at diane@ptminsights.com.
