Team Doctors, Report to ER

If teams are the cure, what's the disease? These days, teams are offered as the answer to whatever ails an organization, from lousy customer service to bloated bureaucracy to bugs in the network. But all too often, teams fail because of what ails them - an assortment of aches and pains, of maladies and malaises that sap performance and confidence, and eventually land even good teams in the intensive-care unit.

We've asked several of the nation's top team doctors to diagnose the five major illnesses that afflict even the best teams, and to prescribe a regimen that will revive a sick team and return it to good health. Each physician is a leading specialist in team diseases, and they all agree that the number-one cause of death among teams is this: The team should never have been formed in the first place! Jon Katzenbach - coauthor, with Douglas K. Smith, of the seminal book The Wisdom of Teams and author of the new Teams at the Top - begins by asking us to consider a heretical question: Should your team even exist?

Col*lec*tive Am*ne*sia, noun: loss of memory, usually caused by brain-dead senior executives who authorize a team without questioning whether the project really needs one. Team members wonder, Why are we here?

You're on a team because some new-paradigm guru told the company's higher-ups that teams are hot. But this is the real world, and it turns out that your project should have been divided among individuals, with a single leader who has real clout riding shotgun. Too late, you discover that the team is superfluous.

Katzenbach, a director at the Dallas office of McKinsey & Co., has become the nation's best-known team doctor by helping scores of high-profile companies, such as Citicorp, General Electric, and Mobil Oil, to use teams wisely. Yet Katzenbach is a big believer in not forming teams.

"Teams are neither efficient nor orderly groupings," he argues, "and teamwork is rarely the fastest way for a group with a capable leader to get where it's going - particularly if the leader has been there before."

The next time you're assigned to a team, use Katzenbach's diagnostic checklist to determine whether the team is better off dead.

Does the project really require collective work? If the work can be divided among, say, eight people who do their parts and leave it to the leader to integrate those parts, then a team adds no real value.

"Team performance is all about doing real work together," says Katzenbach. "And working collectively as a real team means having a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose and to common performance goals, and who hold themselves mutually accountable."

Do team members lead various aspects of the project? If the team leader makes all the critical decisions, you're not on a team - you're on a "single-leader unit."

This nonteam, says Katzenbach, "has a strong leader who knows the marketplace, who's disciplined about setting high performance standards, and who benefits from a well-designed system for assessing individual results. When these conditions exist, real team efforts are often unneeded."

Do people in the group hold one another accountable? If people answer to the boss instead of to one another, it's not a real team.

"A critical litmus test for a real team is whether there's mutual accountability," says Katzenbach. "It's best characterized by the phrase 'we hold each other accountable' - not 'the boss holds us accountable.' Mutual accountability reflects the higher degree of commitment that the members of a real team demonstrate."

Group My*o*pi*a, noun: a deficiency of clear, inspiring goals that leaves teammates confused and undercommitted, causing them to ask, What in the world are we trying to do?

It was an underwhelming goal that nearly sank a project at Texas Commerce Bank (now called Chase Bank of Texas). Top executives there charged several teams with the task of reducing overhead by $50 million. Big mistake. "Teams aren't motivated by numbers - not even big numbers," says Katzenbach. "They're motivated by something to do with the marketplace, like beating a competitor."

Sure enough, the teams made little headway. But instead of increasing the pressure to deliver on a boring project, the company's senior leadership asked the teams to design their own goal - which they did. Their revised objective: to bring employees closer to the customer. "This broadened the range of improvements that the teams could look for," Katzenbach explains. "Management gave them the green light, and they ended up saving nearly $100 million."

What constitutes a "good" goal? One answer comes from a team at Sealed Air Corp., a manufacturer of packaging materials. The team landed an unglamorous but critical assignment: Shorten the average time needed to change machine settings by two hours. Katzenbach says this goal succeeds on five counts: