Yaniv Preiss

A team is 

a group of people who perform interdependent tasks to work toward accomplishing a common mission or specific objective.

Merriam-Webster dictionary

Teamwork is

the collaborative effort of a group to achieve a common goal or to complete a task in an effective and efficient way. Teamwork is seen within the framework of a team, which is a group of interdependent individuals who work together towards a common goal.

Wikipedia

Teams can be composed of people with the same skillset, all performing the same tasks, or complementary skills with varying degrees of overlap.
They are formed for various reasons and in different ways. For example, a team may own a functional responsibility, such as Marketing, a software component or layer or a business domain, be grouped by major skill, such as Backend engineers and Frontend engineers and more.

A lot of research has been done on the topic of teamwork, such as Google’s Aristotle project, Five Dysfunctions of a Team and more, where it has been demonstrated that there are some components of teamwork that are necessary for effectiveness (getting results). Beyond skills, psychological safety and trust play a major role.

However, sometimes and regardless of the reason d’être of the team, instead of having a team in its meaningful way, it is merely a group of individuals who happen to be in the same box in the org chart.

These I call anti-teams.

On the business level, anti-teams suffer from low business continuity, a.k.a as “bus factor”, are fragile to changes, such as a team member leaving, higher attrition, less growth and development and low business results.
On the personal level, members feel like they must play politics, participate in blame-games, will have the tendency to do the bare minimum, significantly waste their brain-cycles on self preservation instead of innovation and regard their work as a mere business transaction – labor for money.

An anti-team might be that way from its creation or deteriorate into such state due to the behaviors of the manager and the members, a.k.a culture.

How to identify

There are evident traits that hinder cooperation, cohesion and collaboration, let’s looks at some common signals to check whether you’re in such a team, leading one, or contributing to one:

Hero culture
A specific individual on the team is always to the rescue when something goes wrong.
A big task or project is given to them.
Sometimes they also surprisingly redo work of their members.

Special snowflake
Rules that apply to everyone, except one member whose bad behavior is tolerated, e.g. doesn’t need to be in team meetings, pair-program or write automated tests.

No psychological safety
Admitting lack of knowledge or reporting mistakes ends in punishing.
Asking questions is a cause for public contempt or ridicule.

Wrath
Members are afraid to approach a specific individual who might get angry or humiliate them.

Each works on own tasks
Tasks of certain type always go specific individuals, each has their own single expertise and they cannot replace each other.

No meetings
Nothing to share, discuss, brainstorm or talk about. Members are expected produce.
Some meetings are a status report of each individual to the manager.

No knowledge sharing
Each works on their own, not knowing what others do or how they do it. Someone’s absence is a cause for delays. Bottlenecks, i.e. waiting for specific individuals to decide or approve are slowing everything down. Members optimize for job security by hoarding knowledge.

Help discouraged
Helping a team member is viewed as a waste of time, a display of incompetence.
Members are encouraged to start a new tasks instead of helping others finish theirs.

Competitiveness
Promote and incentivize self work (sometimes cynically despite company values of teamwork), such as “the first to finish will be rewarded by…” or setting performance metrics that reward finishing own tasks over helping the team. Members always prefer own success over achieving team goals.

No human aspect
Members are resources in a Taylorism mindset, having no team social time, no serendipity opportunities, no human relations, members don’t know each other.

Escalations
As there is no rapport, trust or vulnerability and probably no way to resolve conflict, every issue is escalated to managers.

Ignoring results
The team doesn’t retrospect or change anything as a result of low achievement and failures.

Order taking
Members do not know the “why”, they cannot question or affect the tasks they receive, they only execute them, regardless of their effort size and impact.

Surprises
One member commits in name fo the whole team without consulting or giving a chance to raise concerns.

Gossip
Talking about others who are not present while not saying the same things if they were in the room.

Sabotage
A member who excels at undermining projects or creating chaos within the team, intentionally causing setbacks. Usually in order to prove they were right from the beginning, or to rescue right after.

Communication breakdown
Deliberately creating misunderstandings and miscommunications, making it challenging for team members to exchange information effectively, for topics they don’t wish to see pursued.

Pet peeve
Diverting attention away from the main tasks or ways of working, in order to promote a specific visible or hidden agenda, such as adding a skill to their CV.

Pessimism
An individual who spreads negativity and demoralizes team members, making it difficult for them to stay motivated and engaged.

Decision Obstruction
Someone adept at creating indecision and preventing the team from making progress by constantly challenging decisions and stalling the decision-making process.

Conflict Instigation
A member skilled in sowing discord among team members, promoting conflicts and tensions that hinder effective collaboration.

Voluntold
Members shy away from volunteering, necessitate being told to undertake tasks or responsibilities.

Not social
Members avoid online or real world team events, or hanging out with each other

How to turn the team around as a manager

• Set an example, do not engage yourself in negative behaviors
• Set clear expectations, even admitting that the situation until now was not ideal
• Talk about desired behaviors in 1:1s
• Give continuous feedback
• Coach direct reports about specific behaviors to change
• Delegate tasks and responsibilities
• Build trust within the team, get to know everyone and each learns about others, admit mistakes, ask for help
• Set psychological safety
• Reward helping others
• Tweak the ways of working, such as limiting the work in progress
• Don’t shoot the bringer of bad news, look into the future, resolve the situation
• Break knowledge silos, insist on sharing knowledge
• Coach out members who are not willing to cooperate

You have the power and the duty to turn an anti-team into a high performing team, one behavior at a time!