Are You Leading A Team Or Group Of Individuals?
Two questions you might be asking yourself: Are you leading a team or a group of individuals at work? Is there really much performance difference between the two?
From personal experience of working in many top companies and getting 13 promotions all the way up to board level, the performance of your team is a very big deal to any ambitious manager. A skilled leader can make a huge impact on their team. Research used by McKinsey’s proves that the best managers created 8 times more value through their teams than average managers. 8 times.
Are You Leading A Team Or Group Of Individuals? & Which is Better
- Spotting a team vs a group of individuals
- Which are you leading – a team vs group in the workplace
- The performance difference between a team vs group at work
- 6 practical actions to drive better teamwork in your team
I personally have taken the worst team in a business and turned it into the best team in that business, multiple times, and in the process added millions in profit and cash to those businesses. Even doubling the value your team creates will earn you a big bonus and pay rise and faster promotion.
Leading a team or group of individuals can be the difference between hitting your targets or missing them, and getting your bonus, a good pay rise and promotion or not.
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Spotting a team vs group of individuals at work
What defines a team and what defines a group of individuals in the workplace? Here are some of the differences in leading a team vs a group of individuals.
A group is a collection of individuals who focus on completing their own work with little interaction with other team members. They may work in similar areas or even on similar tasks but don’t collaborate closely or share common goals.
Group Characteristics
The typical characteristics of a group of individuals are
- Independent work: each person focuses on their own tasks without reference to other team members
- No shared accountability: Success or failure is measured on an individual level
- Loose structure: Roles and responsibilities are often not clearly defined
- Communication is optional: Interaction may be minimal, or ad hoc or non-work related
- Goals may differ: Individuals may have personal or departmental objectives.
A team is a cohesive unit of people working together toward a shared goal, with interdependent roles, mutual accountability and a lot of communication within the team.
Team Characteristics
The typical characteristics of a team are:
- Collaborative work: Members rely on each other and help each other to achieve team outcomes
- Shared accountability: Success is measured collectively as a team rather than by individual
- Defined roles: Everyone knows their responsibilities and how they contribute to the success of the team
- Constant communication: to co-ordinate, collaborate and solve problems as well as update, help and encourage
- Unified goals: The team works toward commonly shared team goals, or the team goals are considered much more important than individual goals.
In practice, it is rarely clear cut if you are leading a team vs a group of individuals. In a sec, I will share indicators on a range between a group of individual with minimal teamwork and a team with high levels of teamwork. You can then rate your team against this scale.
Which are you leading – team vs group in the workplace?
One of the quickest and easiest indicators if you are leading a team or a group of individuals is the noise level. The more noise from voices talking and discussing, the more likely you are leading a team. True teams are noisy places. They have to be to co-ordinate, to support, to help, to collaborate, to solve problems together.
I worked at innocent drinks for a couple of years, and visitors to the open plan offices always commented about the quiet din of voices. It was a constant background noise. One of the reasons innocent was so successful is that teamwork was encouraged and facilitated at all levels.
In my experience, 80%+ of managers lead a group of individuals or have a score on this table of 4 or below.
Be honest with yourself and rate your team from 1 to 10. Ask yourself, where your career would get to if you could increase the level of teamwork in your current and future teams?
3 – The Performance of a team vs group at work
The value or additional results that teamwork produces in a group depends very much on factors such as:
- How interconnected each team member’s role is – what dependencies are there between team members to produce good work quickly
- The complexity of the work undertaken i.e. is joint problem solving faster and does it produce better results?
- What level of decision making and problem solving is needed to produce good results at team level – the higher the more benefits from teamwork
- How much co-ordination and collaboration is needed to produce the work efficiently
- The pace of change – strong teams are more adapt at changing direction quickly vs groups of individuals
The higher each of these factors, the greater the performance differential that teamwork will produce compared to a group of individuals.
In my experience, there are not many roles and individuals within groups that truly work independently of others. 80%+ of groups of individuals would produce more valuable output by working more closely with their colleagues via increased teamwork.
I personally have taken multiple groups of individuals and turned them into teams, and in the process increased the measurable value the team created by over 10 times. I personally know the power of teamwork on results.
There are few situations that I have seen in over 20 years of managing teams where better teamwork would not produce better results for that team. Plus working in a positive energetic team with lots of communication and banter is a lot more enjoyable for most people.
The Value Of Teamwork
I was coaching a sales manager, who was looking after a group of individuals in a remote working environment. Through focusing on increasing teamwork within the group of salespeople, the manager and team increased their overall sales by over 10% per month, or $140,000 per month. This is a great example of the power of teamwork directly improving results.
I suggest that most managers aim to increase teamwork within their team so they are leading a team rather than a group of individuals.
6 practical actions to drive better teamwork in your team
There are a lot of good management practices that increase teamwork between team members. Six of the best that I consciously work at doing and displaying as much as possible are:
- Show you have the team’s back. This is an essential trust building activity and shows you put the team before yourself.
- Advertise responsibility and accountability. Make it really clear who is responsible for what tasks, activities and projects within the team and then hold each person and the team as a whole accountable for delivering against their responsibilities
- Incentivise lots of communication between team members. There are a ton of actions that you as a manager can take. Leading from the front and demonstrating great communication is one of the best.
- Find goals that scream success. Setting the right goals for any team is very important. They need to be meaningful, relevant and clearly aligned to the wider business.
- Demand collaboration to break silos. Encourage and push for team members to collaborate and work together. As a manager, you can engineer a lot of collaboration through what and how you delegate work within the team
- Use carrots and sticks or incentives to do what is asked and those to avoid missing expectations or goals.
You can do all of these with no budget and with a little time and effort on your part. For me, the benefits you get back personally are easily several multiples of the effort you put in.
In any group where collaboration, supporting each other and joint problem solving will help each individual do more and produce better, work hard at driving increasing levels of teamwork across the team.
In summary
There are groups of individuals that will perform just as well or even better than teams. These situations are rare in my experience.
The more work you put into creating teamwork, the more likely you will hit team targets which in turn will increase the size of your team, your pay packet and your promotion prospects.
Do go through the factors discussed today to triple check your team will be better off by increasing teamwork. Do take a look at all the resources and courses available to you to significantly improve your management expertise to enable you to create better performing teams now rather than in future years.
If you have any questions on “Are You Leading A Team Or Group Of Individuals? & Which is Better”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
I personally have always seen a massive improvement in engagement, motivation and performance when turning a group of individuals into a team. Teams are great places to work, fulfilling and enjoyable.
Teams are great places to get development, support and be part of something bigger than yourself. In most situations involving complex roles, but not all, I believe a team will easily outperform a group of individuals. This has been my experience.
Do take a look at all our courses to help you build a real team and enable them to deliver their best performance.
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