Team Formation Predicament

Leaders working to build a strong leadership team can be more effective when they understand that there are three basic reasons that potential team members wrestle with forming a leadership team:

Giving up our independence and power
Managers, who become part of a leadership team, find their individual success dependent on other manager's performance and contributions. Most managers are willing to make sacrifices to achieve their own individual success, balk at teamwork demands to make sacrifices for the group success.

Putting up with members not pulling their worth

Leadership teams are made up of managers that perceive rightly or even wrongly of a team member not contributing to the team success or exhibiting the same work ethic. This fosters resentment within the management team.

Teams can be dsyfunctional and slow to respond to challenges

Patrick Lencioni in his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team identifies dsyfunctions with resulting attitudes and behaviors:

• Lack of trust - people don't feel safe to reveal mistakes, share concerns, or express ideas
• Fear of Conflict - people go along for sake of harmony , not talking things out until it bursts into the open
• Lack of Committment - people do not commit to team decisions because they have not contributed their true opinion
• Avoidance of Accountability - people don't accept responsibility and engage in finger pointing when things go wrong
• Inattention to results - Members put personal ambition and success over the collective team success

The Appreciative Inquiry 4D Change model can be a powerful tool create a functional team by building on the member individual and collective strengths, creating a preferred future state and making the necessary changes to achieve that result.