When a team is well established and has been used to its activities for a long time, it will have developed a clarity about itself. This includes everyone’s role and ease in distributing tasks and responsibilities.
Such a team resembles a well-oiled machine.
However, such a setting is also an ideal setting that is becoming rare.
It can be found in larger organizations where tasks can be compartmentalized and kept within a setting that remains stable. Such a team will be focused on tasks that remain similar and it will have established processes easing the flow of their work. It is a setting in which small changes, even changes in the team settings, can be coped with by the team. They’ll see the information that is missing, the details that need adaptation, and act on it.
Things are different when considering a more complex setting. Take, for example, teams that are more frequently affected by change. Or teams where the way of working as a team is an ongoing discussion and processes are not fully defined.
In these settings having an organization working like a well-oiled machine can become the ideal the team tries to aspire to. It is how things should be and how they are measured. With individuals having different ideas of what that ideal is they’ll develop varied expectations. Tensions emerge. Reacting to these tensions the team can choose to wait until they disappear, they can try to search for the root cause, or they can decide to reflect on the situation. The last two options usually lead to conversations and teams trying to solve the problem.
As useful as conversations are, there is an art to them. The risk of such discussions is that they can become endless. Most often as a result of the first of the three options, that is waiting for tensions to disappear.
Originally, the team set itself in motion, worked, and reacted to the events as they appeared. In doing so they achieved a lot of results. There is nothing wrong with this. It probably is how it always works. Much of the clarity can only emerge through experience and learning what it is like to be in that team.
However, what rarely happens is that clarity emerges by itself. The way the team works together, why they are doing what they are doing, or what they are hoping to achieve remain individual ideas.
A reason endless discussions develop in such a situation is the assumption that what has been achieved is confirming one’s own perception of how the team should work. It is the assumption that everything that has been until then was how things should be. It is the belief that the task now is to fine-tune the existing system to reach the well-oiled machine state.
A different approach is to consider what the experience until then has taught the team. There will be much that can be learned about its surroundings, the expectations it is confronted with, the tasks the team can tackle as a team, and the things that require outsourcing.
What makes such a conversation difficult for most teams is to let go of their individual satisfaction with the existing achievements and become humble about them. It’s transforming the conversation from what is right to what is useful going forward.
