There is a reason that all-star teams “draw hard vacuum.” A team is not a collection of individuals. If it devolves into that then you can stand back and watch it disintegrate … notice that word … dis – integrate … to lose cohesion or unity. The loss of integrity. How does a group develop integrity – wholeness, cohesion, unity? How does it become a team?
Credit where due … I have drawn some of this from the website “thebalancecareers.com” where you can find some interesting blogs on business management and leadership;
To be a team a group needs to have (or develop)
Trust – mutual trust of the team members … if it isn’t mutual then it is a problem. Different people have different levels of trustworthiness and … what I call “trustwillingness” – a person’s baseline predisposition to trust others.
There must be at least enough mutual trust so that people aren’t walking around with their backs to the wall all day.
An interesting article from June, 2009 by Roderick Kramer in the Harvard Business Review on their website – “Rethinking Trust” … he argues for “tempered trust”
“Salting your world with lots of small trusting acts sends a signal to others who are themselves interested in building good relationships … [, and decades of research by social psychologist Svenn Lindskold and others have proved that it leads to more positive interactions.] It works because it’s incremental (and thus manages the risks intelligently) and contingent (that is, tied to reciprocity). By taking turns with gradually increasing risks, you build a strong and tempered trust with the other person.”
When you think about it … tight-knit teams are all built that way … the individuals learn to rely on each other increasingly over time. Over. Time. This doesn’t happen overnight.
Besides the fact that it is just a group of individuals, this is one reason why all-star teams suck … there is no time to build a resilient level of trust.
Beside trust, the team has to have shared values … everybody needs to buy in, more or less, to common expectations of
Accountability; commitment discipline – we can advertise that our team has “extreme accountability” (it is in our corporate value statement), but if the team members don’t buy-in … it is just a despair.com poster waiting to happen.
Shared accountability for team success (failure) – the whole team wins/loses together.
Performance and communication – Clear expectations about the level of performance and how and how often the team will communicate.
There also needs to be agreement – a consensus – on things like
How the team will make difficult decisions – difficult, as in, somebody is not going to get his way. That somebody needs to already have signed up to accept the decision if/when it goes against him. You know you have a gelled team when the wrong decision is made and the person who had the right idea (and has been proved right) feels badly.
How the team will deal with differences of opinion – civilized people (and some developers) know how to agree to disagree without it becoming personal. Flintlocks at 20 paces is probably not a good way to moderate differences of opinion. In an engineering environment, the proof is in the pudding (which means, I think, that there is whiskey in the cake). It’s engineering, not personal.
How the team members will support each other. Nobody left behind, right? Read up on the Navy SEALs to get a sense of what it takes to form an elite team.
With respect to training and team formation, the SEALs have an 80% washout rate … you cannot afford that, but if you are trying to build a top-notch team then you have to have the wherewithal to absorb a certain amount of tech churn as you let under-performers.
Chances are good that you do not have that kind of wherewithal … in which case you are building a team from average performers that you generally won’t want to lose … unless they are way below average.