You can’t force teams to work

My first reaction when asked to define a team was, honestly, something close to "so what?"

The provocateur was Professor Rob Briner, standing in front of a room full of HR professionals and organisational psychologists at the CRF Work Psychology Network in London. And here we are, starting with a question that felt almost too basic.

I even said that in the room. One of the things I've noticed as I get older is that it's important to me to share honestly what I'm thinking rather than feel the need to pretend to fit in. But Rob fielded that well and as the discussion opened up, I realised how wrong I was.

The definition matters more than you think

Most of what organisations call "teams" aren't really teams at all. They're a structural way of organising individuals. A label applied to a group of people who happen to report to the same person, sit in the same department, or appear together on an org chart.

That's not the same as a group of people with a clear and shared purpose, who depend on each other to deliver something they couldn't do alone, and who have both the reason and the structure to work as a unit.

When you start to unpick what a real team actually is, you quickly see why so many of them struggle. They were never really set up to be teams in the first place.

You can't force it

Rob's central argument is that you can't force teams to work. What you can do is create the conditions for them to.

That shifts the focus dramatically. Instead of asking "why aren't these people working better together?", you start asking "what's the environment preventing them from doing so?" Often the answer isn't in the room. It's in the structures around it: how often they meet, what they actually do when they're together, whether there's a genuine reason for them to exist as a team at all.

I worked recently with an executive team where the initial presenting problem was: we need to collaborate more. Scratch the surface and what they actually needed first was much more fundamental: what do we call ourselves, when do we meet, and what do we do together that couldn't just be written in an email?

The interpersonal dynamics were real…and that played out when they were together with me. But the environment wasn't set up for them to address those dynamics. You must build the container before you can work with what's inside it.

Teams are never finished

One of the things Rob said that also resonated was that teams are constantly dynamic. Always changing. The old Tuckman model, forming, storming, norming, performing, assumes a linearity that real organisations don't follow. People join. People leave. Teams merge, split, restructure. A team leader's job is never done, because the team is never static.

That means the question "am I creating the right environment for this team?" isn't something you ask once. It's ongoing.

And that's often where leaders need support. Not because they lack the skills, but because it's genuinely hard to hold that space for yourself when you're also in the room, leading the agenda, and carrying the accountability for results. Sometimes you need someone external who can come in, hold the space, and ask the questions you're too close to ask yourself.

A note from the edge of the peloton

I'll be honest: I nearly didn't go. Taking a full day away from building Taggart People, from the commercial conversations, from pushing forward work that matters to me, felt like a cost I wasn't sure I could afford.

It wasn't. It was the opposite. Being in a room with people who think deeply about this stuff reminded me why I do what I do. And, with some irony, it also reminded me that working independently means I'm not really in a team either. Which is something I'm still thinking about.

If you lead a team and you're wondering why it's not quite working, the answer might not be in the room. Message me, I'm happy to think it through with you.