
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:
Take Regular Temperature Readings
- Team interactions are unimaginably complex. To avoid misunderstandings, offenses, omissions, and mistaken
suppositions, teams need open communications. But no one has a full picture of everything that's happening.
The Temperature Reading is a tool for surfacing hidden and invisible information, puzzles, appreciations,
frustrations, and feelings.
When Your Boss Attacks Your Self-Esteem
- Your boss's comments about your work can make your day — or break it. When you experience a comment
as negative or hurtful, you might become angry, defensive, withdrawn, or even shut down. When that happens,
you're not at your best. What can you do if your boss seems intent on making every day a misery?
Four Popular Ways to Mismanage Layoffs: II
- Staff reduction is needed when expenses overtake revenue. But when layoffs are misused, or used too
late, they can harm the organization more than they help. Here's Part II of an exploration of four common
patterns of mismanagement, and some suggestions for those managers and other employees who recognize
the patterns in their own companies.
The Myth of Difficult People
- Many books and Web sites offer advice for dealing with difficult people. There are indeed some difficult
people, but are they as numerous as these books and Web sites would have us believe? I think not.
Virtual Interviews: II
- The pandemic has made face-to-face job interviews less important. And so we must now also master virtual
interviews, and that requires understanding the effects of the attendance list, video presence, and
the technologies of staging, lighting, and makeup.
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 March 29: Time Slot Recycling: The Risks
- When we can't begin a meeting because some people haven't arrived, we sometimes cancel the meeting and hold a different one, with the people who are in attendance. It might seem like a good way to avoid wasting time, but there are risks. Available here and by RSS on March 29.
And on April 5: The Fallacy of Division
- Errors of reasoning are pervasive in everyday thought in most organizations. One of the more common errors is called the Fallacy of Division, in which we assume that attributes of a class apply to all members of that class. It leads to ridiculous results. Available here and by RSS on April 5.
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