Teams enable us to do things we could never accomplish working individually — or if we could accomplish them, they would just take too long to be worth doing. For that reason alone, we need teams. But working in teams carries with it risks that arise much more often than when we work as individuals. Here's a short catalog of these risks.
- Runaway damage risk
- The power of teamwork amplifies not only the team's ability to do good, but also its ability to do damage. When we produce wrong-headed output for whatever reason, we must undo the damage we do. But before recognizing what happened, a team can do much more damage than an individual can.
- Interpersonal conflict risk
- When there are interpersonal problems in teams, everyone's productivity can be degraded. And the conflict might be unrelated to the work at hand. It can be a residual effect of a previous effort, or it can arise from something as unrelated to the work as unfounded rumors of changes in office assignments.
- Decision-making risk
- The word team means different things to different people. For example, with respect to decision processes, some of us believe that team means that each person's opinion is of equal weight. Others are searching only for work to do, and will do that work without question. Teams must define their decision processes for corresponding classes of situations. If they don't, each member will assume that their preferred decision process is in force. That difference in expectations can lead to interpersonal conflict. See "Decisions, Decisions: I," Point Lookout for November 17, 2004, for a summary of common decision processes.
- Coordination risk
- Teamwork is inherently parallel. The working members of the team assume that the parts they're working on will fit with the parts other people are working on. If a problem develops, and one of the parts has to be revised, some of the work already completed might have to be done again. This possibility is much less likely when a single person does all the work, because that person is presumably aware of all that has been done or will be done. Coordination risk is highest when interpersonal communication is the least effective, or when uncertainty is greatest.
- Wariness risk
- Inherent in The power of teamwork amplifies
not only the team's ability to do
good, but also its ability to do damageparallelism is the need to trust that teammates working on other elements are honoring their commitments. That is, we give our all to one portion of the work, trusting teammates to do the same with theirs. If trust is absent, and people become wary, they devote some of their efforts to protecting themselves from blame. That is what makes wariness so expensive. - Intra-task deadlock risk
- Within the team's task, deadlock occurs when some members of the team are waiting for the output of one or more of the rest of the team. The whole thing can lock up if a dependency loop develops. If a subtask is late because of unanticipated difficulty or lost workdays, the rest of the team can become stuck.
Team-based development is different from the scaled-up effort of a single individual. Think it through carefully. Top Next Issue
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Related articles
More articles on Project Management:
- Restarting Projects
- When a project gets off track, we sometimes cancel it. But since canceling projects takes a lot of courage,
we look for ways to save them if we can. Often, things do turn out OK, and at other times they don't.
There's a third choice, between pressing on with a project and canceling it. We can restart.
- An Agenda for Agendas
- Most of us believe that the foundation of a well-run meeting is a well-formed agenda. What makes a "well-formed"
agenda? How can we write and manage agendas to make meetings successful?
- Design Errors and Group Biases
- Design errors can cause unwanted outcomes, but they can also lead to welcome surprises. The causes of
many design errors are fundamental attributes of the way groups function. Here is Part II of our exploration.
- Ten Approaches to Managing Project Risks: III
- Project risk management strategies are numerous, but these ten strategies are among the most common.
Here are the last three of the ten strategies in this little catalog.
- Anticipating Absence: Internal Consulting
- Most consultants are advisors from outside the organization. But when many employees are unavailable
because of the Coronavirus pandemic, we need to find ways to access the knowledge that remains inside
the organization. Internal consulting can help.
See also Project Management and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
- Coming March 20: Top Ten Ways to Make Meetings More Effective
- Meetings are just about everybody's least favorite part of working in organizations. We can do much better if only we take a few simple steps to improve them. The big one: publish the agenda in advance. Here are nine other steps to improve meetings. Available here and by RSS on March 20.
- And on March 27: Allocating Action Items
- From time to time in meetings we discover tasks that need doing. We call them "action items." And we use our list of open action items as a guide for tracking the work of the group. How we decide who gets what action item can sometimes affect our success. Available here and by RSS on March 27.
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