“Strong individuals do not necessarily make up a great team. Teams with no conflict are rarely very creative.  Diversity of talent by itself does not cause success.” Donald F. Hadley

Teams can have great potential. The individuals may have the background, training and all of the resources to be able to accomplish great things, yet year after year, the results are mediocre. Flashes of brilliant teamwork will occur and then rapidly recede into the background. The potential is never realized. Leaders get more and more frustrated as the mediocrity continues amidst the trials and opportunities around the organization. Crisis takes a lot out of the team and they are never truly able to take full advantage of the opportunities.    

What are the five obstacles that keep your team from getting results?
Attitude 

• Not trusting in the people around them:  Without the trust of co-workers, your team will be unwilling to share information, try new approaches or engage on important issues.  This causes surface relationships. It looks calm on the surface, but not having trust in peers or direct reports creates an unwillingness to act. 
• Not trusting in the capabilities of the leadership or organization: Whether it is fear of losing jobs, the goals being changed, or the inability to get resources, if a team will not challenge the top levels of an organization, you get a team that does what they are told.  This is similar to the first mistake, but the mistrust is directed upstream. 
• Apathy (they just don’t care): Whether they have no vision or they are too close to being gone (retirement or another job), some teams just do not care. There is just no desire. The individuals on the team may be good “B” players, but without a catalyst, they see no value in doing it any better or together. 

Values 

• Values of the individuals are different: Quality has become less of an issue and price more critical, especially in the last two-three years. Shorter-term focus is becoming a habit and there is less long-term or forward thinking. This causes a misalignment between individuals. Sometimes rather than dealing with it, these differences become sand in the gears that stops progress. If there are conflicting sets of values in place, teams will stand still.  
• Value the habit of theorizing, talking and thinking more than doing, testing, and trying: The world of ideas can be a great playground. However, thinking and talking can be so much fun it becomes an end in itself. It is like watching the same movie over and over, but at the end, the audience gets up, walks out and goes on to have the same behaviors they had before the movie. There is no improvement or change in anything.  “Knowing” is not “doing”. 
• Don’t value the team as much as the individuals: Teams, like organizations, are their own unique entity. Some individuals are unwilling or unable to surrender their rights and responsibilities as individuals and engage as a team. The individuals insist on focusing on individual results.

 Strategy 

• No destination: Even worse than having a bad destination is having no destination.  Some people don’t mind drifting along. The best people will move on to another organization that is clearly striving towards a vision.  
• The destination is not attractive: Every individual and every team has a decision every day to choose to engage or not. They may not understand the destination or they may truly not want to go there.  
• No way to see if there is measurable progress for the organization, team or individual:  The team may have long-term goals, but if they do not feel or see the progress, they may quit striving.  Without milestones, they are unsure of where they are and don’t know what to do differently. 
• Focus on incremental, short-term results: There may be goal setting in this environment, but the way it is being done will not allow for an opportunity to make big leaps. The team is focuses more on tasks and incremental results right now. They are not identifying big leaps that can naturally and safely occur. 
• Trying to do too much too fast: As a general rule, trying to do too much means that nothing gets done. There may be lots of activity with very little progress. The focus of the team is on little tasks and not on important powerful strategic results. It is hard to prioritize what is most important. It feels like there is always more to do and everyone is perpetually tired.

 Skills 

• Missing skills – don’t know how: The team has not had the training and exposure to “how” to do what is needed. In a leadership meeting recently, a team member said that they did not really understand leadership. It is great that they had the self-awareness and the confidence to be able to say that; now we can do something about it. 
• Cognitive and conative imbalance: Based on the natural and trained capabilities of a team, there may be too much strength in a particular area causing inertia. You can have conflicting strengths, creating polarization. If this is not handled well, conflict can prevent teams from “just doing it”. 
• They do not have good conflict: Conflict creates increased capabilities and results if done well. Some teams do not know how to have good conflict so they either shy away from issues that need to be dealt with, or the conflict is handled poorly so that creativity and communication are shut down. 
• Lack of mutual accountability: We have seen a number of teams where most individuals are very capable. A few team members may be struggling. The few that struggle are the responsibility of the whole team. If everyone does not work with them, the law of the lowest performing team member kicks in and prevents the team from taking powerful actions resulting in mediocrity.

Leadership 

• The top leaders go direct to the rest of the organization (they bypass The Leadership Team): This dynamic may occur when there is an actual issue that needs to be dealt with quickly or the leader is impatient with the results being achieved by The Leadership Team. While this is a practical quick fix to deal with an issue it prevents The Leadership Team from having to using and developing their capabilities.  It also teaches the culture to bypass The Leadership Team. 
• Leadership skills are weak or not used at all: Sometimes leadership skills are just plain not being used or missing. It is sometimes the most frustrating part of being on a team because this one issue may be all that is in the way. They may not have confidence in their skills or they may not see leadership as part of the job description. 
• Leadership is not using expectations to create the need: Leaders say that they “just want their team to lead”, or “be a team” or … it is never that simple. These leaders have forgotten that if there is a need, typically you do not have to say the word “lead” or “teamwork”. The need (e.g. vision) is the energy to cause the leadership and results.  

The Comprehensive Independence Builder 

If you are interested in an assessment of your team, schedule your Independence Exploration Session by contacting us at 800-786-4332 ext. 108, or lvadala@appliedvisionworks.com.  

You may also wish to learn more about our unique process for leaders, teams and cultures called The Comprehensive Independence Builder^TM, in which we address all of the obstacles you face and help you use innovative strategies to protect and enhance your organization, improve your quality of life and better achieve your goals.