![The Marx brothers: Chico, Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo The Marx brothers: Chico, Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo](../images/marx-brothers.png)
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:
Mudfights
- When we steer the discussion away from issues to attack the credibility, motives, or character of our
debate partners, we often resort to a technique known as the ad hominem attack. It's unfair, it's unethical,
and it leads to bad, expensive decisions that we'll probably regret.
Virtual Communications: I
- Participating in or managing a virtual team presents special communications challenges. Here are some
guidelines for communicating with members of virtual teams.
Recalcitrant Collaborators
- Much of the work we do happens outside the context of a team. We collaborate with people in other departments,
other divisions, and other companies. When these collaborators are reluctant, resistive, or recalcitrant,
what can we do?
Using the Parking Lot
- In meetings, keeping a list we call the "parking lot" is a fairly standard practice. As the
discussion unfolds, we "park" there any items that arise that aren't on the agenda, but which
we believe could be important someday soon. Here are some tips for making your parking lot process more
effective.
Flattery and Its Perils
- Flattery is a tool of manipulation. When skillfully employed, it's difficult to distinguish from praise
or admiration. When we confuse flattery with praise, we are in peril.
See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness, Effective Meetings, Project Management and Virtual and Global Teams for more related articles.
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And on July 10: On Delegating Accountability: I
- As the saying goes, "You can't delegate your own accountability." Despite wide knowledge of this aphorism, people try it from time to time, especially when overcome by the temptation of a high-risk decision. What can you delegate, and how can you do it? Available here and by RSS on July 10.
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