What Makes a Good Team Great?

This is a question that vexes business managers just as much as football managers and fans. You can assemble all the right ingredients and have, on paper at least, a world beating team. But what happens when that team does not perform as well as you thought it would, if it does not gel or feel right? Star players who shone as individuals in one environment simply fail to prosper in another. Given the time and money spent assembling the team in the first place you are unlikely to get much sympathy from your managing director when it fails to work.

So, how do you ensure your team is more Real Madrid than Ackrington Stanley? What is the vital missing ingredient, aside of course from David Beckham?

Is there a personality clash?
Is there too much of one skill and not enough of another?
Is the management style overly intrusive?
Is it bad team dynamics or a combination of all the above?

The possible permutations are endless and fixing it could be down to trial and error. Shooting the referee is not the answer, so what is?

A team needs to analyse its structure – how it works, what its strengths and weaknesses are and the role each individual plays within it. You need to get quickly to the root cause of the problem and plan remedial measures from this. Self awareness plays a huge part in this. People often don’t know how other members of their team see them. One guy might see himself as an assertive leader but in reality he is an autocratic dictator. He in turn might have a low opinion of the quietly spoken back office people. Everyone needs to appreciate that both types of people are essential to the success of the team.

Team Audit enables an organisation to identify ideal team culture, assess the actual team members and provide a gap analysis in terms of behavioural and role shortfall. The audit also predicts a team’s reaction to change, allowing an organisation to plan with confidence. It’s unique strength is that it gets to the root cause of the problem in hours rather than weeks.

The team audit can be used when:

• Teams are not performing as well as they should be
• Company strategy calls for a cultural change
• An organisation is not performing
• Team membership changes