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 ?

Why working in a team is the best leadership development ...

Bringing a diverse group of people together and asking them to find solutions for a complex company-wide problem will push participants slightly out of their comfort zone. How they deal with this challenge will demonstrate their capability to learn and survive in the VUCA world in the future.

A recent experience with a services firm confirmed this. I worked with 11 high potentials during a couple of months. The organization's focus was to validate who from them were really high-potentials, ready for further development or promotion. At the end of the series of sessions, the team presented their conclusions and recommendations on the challenge they had worked on, and each team member presented separately to the top management team what they had learned, the insights they had discovered and how they evaluated the experience over all.

And it was during the individual presentations that things got interesting. Some of the people who were thought of as high-potentials confirmed or even exceeded their potential. Others who had in fact been a bit under the radar jumped out from the crowd and positively surprised the management team. And a few who were considered as top guns strongly disappointed.

As the country manager said (at the end of the session): "We now know where people really stand ... and in some cases that is not where we thought they were standing !".

We could have decided on some leadership training. And I am sure the participants would have liked it. And learned a lot. But working in a team, not being in their area of expertise and having to progress together really highlighted the strengths some had, and brought to the fore the gaps others were struggling with.

It is tempting to identify HIPOs and future leaders by looking at each of your team members individually. But it is by having them work in a team that you really will see how they stack up !