Taking teams for granted ...

When a professional develops experience and successes over the years, he at one point often gets promoted to manager (or leader, or supervisor ... pick your preferred term). And most of the time does quite well. He will get some feedback or evaluation about which of the managerial skills he needs to develop. And again most of the time all this goes well. Until it no longer does. And then the peers or superiors get into analysis mode about how to deal with this manager (leader, supervisor ...) who is not performing as he should. At that point, we often realize that the person had kind of - accidentally ? - stumbled into a management role. He had not really been prepared, or mentored, or trained to take on the role of a manager.

We often assume that people know what management is about because of what they have seen around them. If you have been around it, can't be so difficult to do the same, the thinking goes.

In my experience, the same happens with teams in organizations. Second to leadership, teams are probably one of the most talked about/written about concepts of personal and organizational development. Everybody knows what a team is, often starting from a young age with sports teams. And when we start to work, we are part of teams. Or at least they tell us we are part of teams. Some teams are working well, others are not. So just as with the management itself, we assume that people know what teams are and what to do or not to do when working on a team. But often, and in my experience this happens even more frequently than the case of the individual managers, teams do not live up to the expectations or the potential. Open conflict is probably (hopefully !) rare, but what we call a team is most of the time a group of individuals coming together once in a while to share information.

A team can be so much more. But for that to happen, you cannot expect to get there without some effort. Teams require work. Where do you rate your team in 2016 on a scale from 1 to 10, and what is your plan to improve on that in 2017 ?