Teams are dysfunctional by definition!

One of the biggest misconceptions in management is the belief that teams are high-performing from the start. You just need to select the right people and put them in the right roles—and the rest will take care of itself!

This misconception is particularly dangerous for supervisory boards. Highly paid headhunters search for the right candidate for an open executive position. Experience, expertise, and nowadays even social skills are thoroughly assessed—until the “perfect” person is finally found.

Afterwards, he or she is introduced with great fanfare, and everyone hopes that the new executive team will quickly reach high performance. Unfortunately, that’s an illusion. Especially at the executive level, people have strong ambitions and personal interests. Silo thinking, competition, and self-optimization are therefore not the exception, but the rule. Teams are dysfunctional by definition—just as humans are not born able to walk and birds are not born able to fly.

That in itself isn’t dramatic—if you accept it and are willing to work on it. But that’s exactly where things often fall apart. People convince themselves that they have neither the time nor the budget—nor the patience—for team development efforts.

Strategy, costs, and quality need to be driven forward. There are already enough meetings for that—so a “feel me, sense me” exercise is the last thing anyone thinks they need right now.

The truth is: those who don’t work on their collaboration will never lead their organization to long-term success. Studies show that teaming not only improves efficiency and productivity, but also the well-being of team members.

What matters, however, is that such measures are purposeful and high-quality. Running a workshop just for the sake of it only leads to frustration—and to resistance against any future “soft interventions”.

Good interventions therefore focus on:

• Establishing a “Good Fight Club”: teams only truly progress when they stop being merely nice and polite to each other and start putting the real issues on the table—based on genuine trust. The absence of conflict is not harmony—it is apathy!
• Showing up authentically: as long as everyone is just playing a role, no one admits mistakes, and no one has the courage to talk about their feelings, a team cannot move forward. Our most accurate measure of courage is vulnerability!
• Putting the “we” above the “I”: as long as team members lack clarity about each other’s roles and ambitions, trust and a sense of unity cannot emerge. Discussions without trust are politics—discussions with trust are a search for truth.

Building a high-performance team is not rocket science—you just have to be willing to truly work on it. All teams are born equal; some simply work harder on their social skills!