Why the Members Define a Team

Why the Members Define a Team

The team members role

Since childhood we are taught that leaders are important figures in organizations. Often, the explicit or implicit message is that it is the leaders who decide what organizations should do, how they should do it, and how well they end up doing things. However, teams can be described as dynamic systems in which all members of a team influence each other – all the time. This means that any individual – not only the leader – can change the pattern of a team, and consequently has the power to “make or break” the team. Hence, the behavior of each group member can have a big impact on the whole group.

Behavioral patterns in teams – a team’s culture

Over time, all teams form patterns. These patterns include how team members take on roles and get used to the behavior and personalities of other members by repeatedly behaving in the same way around each other. This also means that if a group is already behaving in a collectively intelligent way, group members tend to follow this behavior. The same goes for teams with low collective intelligence.

Behavioral patterns can be described as a team’s culture. Culture is usually considered to be something that is given and difficult to change. However, we argue that this is not the case and that culture, in fact, can be changed. In other words, patterns can be broken: As all members influence each other, one team member changing his or her behavior has the potential to affect the other team members’ behavior as well, slowly changing the culture of the group.

However, breaking behavioral patterns within a group can be difficult and considered awkward. People are not programmed to act against the culture of a group, and the person breaking the patterns might encounter resistance from other team members. Nonetheless, to help a team become high performing, it is sometimes necessary to break these patterns.

Behaviors supporting high performing teams

To help your team become high performing, you must be aware of and choose your own behaviors in line with what will be constructive for the team. These constructive behaviors are:

1. Continuously developing your understanding of the team’s purpose, context and situation
2. Being heedful – acting with attention and care towards the team, the situation and yourself
3. Taking responsibility for the teams’ mood

Continuously developing your understanding of the team’s purpose, context and situation

Historically, continuously developing your understanding of the team’s purpose, context and situation has been considered a responsibility of the leader. However, as organizations are dealing with higher degrees of specialization and more complex working conditions, team members cannot solely rely on the leader for this behavior. To be a self-navigating team member, the individual needs to understand circumstances, conditions, purpose and ideas etc., on the same level as the leader. To achieve this, the group must work on its representation, which is the team’s understanding of its task and the context in which it is performed. What distinguishes a collectively intelligent group in this aspect is that group members can describe the task and its purpose in a thorough and complex way, still using similar formulations in their descriptions. Members are engaged, care about the assignment, and continuously discuss it. The concept of representation will be discussed further in the chapter on the CI-model.

For now, we have established an understanding that it is important for a team member to know the purpose, context and situation of a task to be able to support his or her team in becoming high performing. However, it does not matter how well team members know the purpose, conditions, strategies etc., if they do not have the skills to deal with unexpected events or the mere complexity of tasks and situations. We call this behavior being heedful.

Being heedful – acting with attention and care towards the team, the situation and yourself

In this context, being heedful refers to being caring, attentive and purposeful in relation to your team, the situation, and yourself. Being heedful surpasses mere application of your skills and knowledge to include how you make use of them in any specific situation. This means that you must be aware of and analyze what the team, the situation, as well as yourself needs, and based on this deliver with strategic timing.

Being heedful is important because all team members, at some point, end up in situations where they do not have an opportunity to discuss strategy, purpose, or conditions with the team. In these situations, results will be directly related to the attention and care of the individual team member. A precondition to be able to act with heed in such a situation is that you, as a team member, have a thorough understanding of the purpose, goals, conditions, etc., mentioned in the previous paragraph. If your understanding of the situation is halfhearted, you will only be able to act halfheartedly – your opportunities to contribute will be limited by your understanding of the task and purpose.

We could compare this to a football team out on the pitch. In the middle of a game, you will not be able to discuss your strategy, purpose or tactics, and the level of the team work conducted is a direct result of the attention and care of each player. The level of the team work will, in turn, be constituted by the sum of how well each member plays the game. Team work, as described here, is what we refer to as integration, something that we discuss further in the chapter on the CI-model.

Taking responsibility for the team’s mood

Finally, all teams “feel” in a certain way. In the same way as people have different levels of energy, confidence, etc., teams go through different phases of feelings and moods. In high performing teams, team members work together to create a positive mood in the team and to establish a good group feeling, confidence, and shared motivation. However, this is not always easy. Teams can experience conflicts, uncertainty, stress, or simply struggle to get the work done. Under such circumstances, one should remember what was previously mentioned: that you, as a team member, always have power to influence the behavior of the rest of the team. The person “responsible” for a specific behavior in a group can vary though, and this is one of the great benefits with groups. Any member can take on a role to help the group out of a tough phase, help others to focus, laugh, reflect, or whatever else is needed in a situation.

When we discuss taking responsibility for the team’s mood, it is important to highlight that this covers more than creating a good atmosphere for the people in the team – it is about increasing performance and business value. Research shows that performance is determined by culture. Still, few organizations are investing enough in this type of team culture and co-operation. We argue that strategically working with culture provides a clear competitive advantage that more organizations should exploit.

Author

Influence Labs

CI Model Research

Developing Collective Intelligence is an approach to share and integrate knowledge using self-navigation and reflection to achieve commonly defined goals.