
The Marx brothers (Chico, Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo), early in their career. Comedy teams — make that successful comedy teams — display all of the features of high performance teams. Their performance requires dedicated commitment, a high sense of trust and strong interpersonal relationships. For instance, in live performance, things rarely go exactly as planned. It's up to the team members to adapt as they go, in response to the odd things that happen. Courtesy U.S. Library of Congress.
Most organizations execute their work in groups they call teams. When they really are teams, they're very effective. An increasingly common structure is the "virtual team," which usually consists of people from different organizations, or people who reside at different geographical sites, or both.
Both of the qualities of being virtual and being distributed tend to make team formation more difficult, because they hinder the development of warm, trusting, personal relationships.
Although virtual teammates do coordinate their efforts, the personal dimension of their collaboration is sometimes so limited that we cannot truly call them teams. Sometimes, they know each other only through email, text, or telephone, and the telephone calls are often at odd hours. They are teams in name only — TINOs.
That's fine, but problems arise when we try to manage TINOs as if they were teams. If we expect members of TINOs to identify with the group, and if we expect team management techniques to work when we aren't actually dealing with teams, we're headed for trouble.
In a future article, we'll discuss management techniques for TINOs. But let's begin by examining the attributes of TINOs.
- Conflicting commitments
- The defining feature of a team is that its people work together so closely that they can anticipate each other's strides and stumbles. When needed, they step in to support each other, and their support is welcome. In TINOs, when almost everyone is working on multiple teams, it's hard to focus on teammates or what they might need.
- Limited sense of trust
- Although a TINO's people sometimes make commitments, their "honoring rate" can be low. It's not that they don't care — they're usually just overcommitted, or they don't really feel allegiance to the TINO. This leads to a low level of trust, which they replace with "monitoring." That is, they spend significant effort reporting to each other and to "those responsible" about how things are going. Trust is much cheaper than monitoring, but it's impossibly unreliable when people are so overcommitted.
- Weak interpersonal relationships
- Although a TINO's people
sometimes make commitments,
their "honoring rate"
can be low - In TINOs, many relationships between pairs of team members are weak, and limited to the task at hand. In fact, some pairs have never even met. To each other, many are just voices on the phone — they've never seen photos of each other, and never visit each other's offices. When the project gets into trouble, and they convene an Emergency Project Review, some team members meet for the very first time, even though they've been "working together" for months (or longer!).
Conflicting commitments, a limited sense of trust, and weak interpersonal relationships can have varying effects — think of them as possible indicators of risk. Almost anything you do to reduce split assignments, to create trust, and to strengthen personal relationships will help. What can you do today? Top
Next Issue
Is your organization a participant in one or more global teams? Are you the owner/sponsor of a global team? Are you managing a global team? Is everything going well, or at least as well as any project goes? Probably not. Many of the troubles people encounter are traceable to the obstacles global teams face when building working professional relationships from afar. Read 303 Tips for Virtual and Global Teams to learn how to make your global and distributed teams sing. Order Now!
For more about Trust, see "Creating Trust," Point Lookout for January 21, 2009, "The High Cost of Low Trust: I," Point Lookout for April 19, 2006, and "Express Your Appreciation and Trust," Point Lookout for January 16, 2002.
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Related articles
More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
When You Think They've Made Up Their Minds
- In tough negotiations, when attempts to resolve differences have failed, we sometimes conclude that
"they've made up their minds," but other explanations abound. Keeping an open mind about why
other people seem to have closed theirs can help us find a resolution.
Virtual Communications: II
- Participating in or managing a virtual team presents special communications challenges. Here's Part
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The Shower Effect: Sudden Insights
- Ever have a brilliant insight, a forehead-slapping moment? You think, "Now I get it!" or "Why
didn't I think of this before?" What causes these moments? How can we make them happen sooner?
How to Foresee the Foreseeable: Focus on the Question
- When group decisions go awry, we sometimes feel that the failure could have been foreseen. Often, the
cause of the failure was foreseen, but because the seer was a dissenter within the group, the issue
was set aside. Improving how groups deal with dissent can enhance decision quality.
Anticipating Absence: Quarantine and Isolation
- When the pandemic compels some knowledge workers to quarantine or isolate, we tend to treat them as
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See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness, Effective Meetings, Project Management and Virtual and Global Teams for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming October 4: Self-Importance and Conversational Narcissism at Work: I
- Conversational narcissism is a set of behaviors that participants use to focus the exchange on their own self-interest rather than the shared objective. This post emphasizes the role of these behaviors in advancing a narcissist's sense of self-importance. Available here and by RSS on October 4.
And on October 11: Self-Importance and Conversational Narcissism at Work: II
- Self-importance is one of four major themes of conversational narcissism. Knowing how to recognize the patterns of conversational narcissism is a fundamental skill needed for controlling it. Here are eight examples that emphasize self-importance. Available here and by RSS on October 11.
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