Special purpose teams are generally formed to solve a problem.
However, it seems that ‘collaboration’ has become so integral to many corporate cultures, that every problem becomes an opportunity to ‘collaborate’. Teams are often formed without sufficient reference to the experience and capabilities required to define and address the problem.
When you want a problem assessed, and a resulting action to remove it, you must hold somebody accountable for the outcome.
A process or task that is not attached to a person’s name will rarely be optimised.
Often when an ad hoc team is formed in response to a perceived problem, the performance of that team becomes marginal, simply because it is always somebody else’s job to be accountable for all or part of the solution.
The task of a team is to:
- Define a problem by looking at the blockage from many perspectives provided by the individuals in the team. This is why the choice of personnel is critical. Do not make the common mistake of allocating personnel who seem to have the time to a team. Allocate personnel by expertise and leadership styles.
- Generate possible solutions, and then:
- Pick one possible solution, perhaps after some initial experimentation, and then:
- Allocate an individual to be accountable for the execution of the chosen course of action.
- Rinse and repeat.
Do that, and the team will deliver results when members have been selected by the capabilities necessary, assuming you also give them the resources needed to do the job being asked of them.
Failure to assemble a team carefully, which requires leadership, will ensure little more than a gabfest.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Fishburne at www.Marketoonist.com.
