Circles and triangles.
There are teams that function – and teams that don’t function. There are teams were people feel invested – and teams where people could care less. There are many types of teams that we find ourselves a part of. We’re members in sports teams, work teams, volunteer teams, even in academia, Sauder is notorious for imposing team based projects and activities on their students. From our experiences, we know that there is a certain formula of team structure and formation that seems to work. You feel it when you’re part of a functional team. You feel invested, engaged, accountable, and most importantly, you feel like the total team output is greater than just the summation of the individual pieces.
So what makes a team click? There has been many studies on the effectiveness on teams, all of which have tried to derive the secret formula behind successful teams. The conclusion, as outlined by Katzenbach and Smith in their article, “The Discipline of Teams”, is surprisingly simple. Successful teams have three main things which I have summarized into three easy to remember words: seeking, sharing, caring. Successful teams have a well defined and collectively agreed upon mission. They strive together to achieve the same goal. In other words, the invest time, energy, and money into a project to seek out the desired goal. Successful teams also share. They share the leadership roles and responsibilities. Because of their shared leadership role they have the ability to share both project related tasks and leadership related tasks. This sharing of leadership allows all members of the team to be engaged and invested. And lastly, successful teams care. They’re accountable to the task at hand and they’re also accountable to each other. They care about the details and put an emphasis on quality.
Seeking. Sharing. Caring. One can almost draw a parallel between these concepts and the shapes that can represent them well. A dysfunctional teams almost represents a triangle. There is no centralize vision, there is a clear leader at the top of the triangle who does not share responsibilities amongst their team members at the base of the pyramid, and the accountability of each members has rough straight edges. A functional team, on the other hand, has a centralized vision in the middle of the circle, the leadership roles are shared evenly amongst all the members, and accountability is level and evenly distributed amongst everyone.
Seems like a perfect formula doesn’t it? Kelley agrees in the article, “The Ten Faces of Innovation”. He finds that the root of inhibited innovation in organizations is the toxicity that the devil’s advocate brings to the group. Wait a second – but isn’t a devils advocate required? Let’s revisit the circle and triangles visualization. One may think that a devil’s advocate fits better in the triangle. They “stop” ideas in their tracks, find “holes” in proposed recommendations, and make the flow of information more “jagged”. Something you can easily visualize in a triangle. But consider the circle. How easy would it be to puncture a hole in our perfect circle because of a fundamental flaw in our project? A missing financial piece? An incorrect assumption? The devil’s advocate could, hypothetically, find these holes and flaws sooner and help smooth over potential cracks and breaks. In fact, the devils advocate could actually strengthen the circle. Make the edges of the circle more smooth. And cause a relatively healthy amount of conflict that would inspire the circle to grow it’s size and even, gasp, change colour.
Cool eh? It’s circle time.