The Eight Essentials of Teams
By Michael Wilkinson, CMF
Managing Director, Leadership Strategies, Inc.
Does each of the teams with which you are involved have the essentials for success? At Leadership Strategies, we are called in from time to time to work with teams at various stages in the team cycle.
- Often we are called in at the beginning to help charter the team and get the team started moving together in a consistent direction.
- Other times, we become involved while the team is engaged in the work. This frequently occurs with teams that are experiencing difficulties in achieving goals due to issues within the team.
- And still other times, we are asked to take a team through a debriefing exercise to document successful strategies and areas for improvement.
Through experiences like these with a variety of teams, we have identified what we believe are the “eight essentials” – that is, the eight things every team needs to be successful. We have found that a team missing one of the essentials can still be successful through persistence and strength of the team members, but it is very difficult. A team missing two essentials is severely handicapped and our experience has been that the chances of success are low. However, for a team missing three of the essentials, the likelihood of success is so low, one can predict with high probability that failure is imminent!
What are the eight essentials?
| Purpose |
The mission or reason for being |
| Deliverable |
The product or results expected |
| Constraints |
The time by when the deliverable is to be completed; additional limitations/conditions |
| Accountability |
The person or authority from whom the team receives its charge, by whom the charge is changed, or to whom the team reports |
| Resources |
The people who participate on the team, time, funds, etc. |
| Leadership |
The method used to make decisions, assign tasks, establish policies, address issues, etc. |
| Work Process |
The method used to produce the deliverable |
| Teamwork |
The level of trust, communication, and participation |
Note the bold line separating the first five essentials from the last three. The line is significant in that the top five are different from the bottom three in a number of ways.
|
Top Five |
Bottom Three |
| How the team is organized | How the team operates |
| What the team is trying to do | How the team will get it done |
| Should be given to the team | Should be created by the team |
This last point is critical. In most cases, the top five should be given to the team. A team that is not given the top five essentials may be poorly chartered. Once a team is chartered, they need to focus on ensuring they develop the bottom three. In our work with teams, we have found teams that failed because they were poorly chartered (missing one or more of the top five) as well as teams that failed because they executed poorly (the bottom three).
As you look at the teams with which you are involved, does the team have the eight essentials? You can learn about teams and leading teams through our class, The Facilitative Consultant.
Michael Wilkinson is the Managing Director of Leadership Strategies – The Facilitation Company and author of The Facilitative Consultant training course. Prior to Leadership Strategies, he spent eight years with Ernst & Young’s Management Consulting Group. You can get more tips from either of Michael’s books, The Secrets of Facilitation or The Secrets to Masterful Meetings. You can receive a signed copy through our website.
