Or, How Much More Can Be Said?

There are endless books, essays, Medium articles, blog posts, audio books, podcasts, seminars, camps, and even university courses on leadership and team-building, so why am I beating this dead horse?

I’ve been a member of quite a few teams over the past 30 years — sports teams, social teams, work teams, community teams. A couple of these teams were successful far beyond expectation, a few were unequivocal dumpster fires, and the majority were inconsistent with spurts of moderate success and cohesion and spurts of never-to-be-resolved conflicts and long stretches of struggle. In the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to work with a few organizations of varying sizes, all of which were struggling to move towards their objectives, and this has raised the question for me personally: why some of the teams I have been on have worked so well and why some have so efficiently failed. Of course, if you’re reading this, you have asked yourself similar questions. And certainly many thousands of people have asked themselves the same question an chosen to research and write articles, books, etc. about the topic.

I'm choosing to write about the topic as an exercise for myself. I want to sift through and organize my personal experience, as well as the ocean of resources that exist, and distill it all into a coherent, foundational set of principles that I can move forward with and I hope it provides value to others as well. It has become clear to me that the success of the group as a whole, as well as the success of the individuals in the organization, is highly contingent upon how well the team works together. However, as I’ve experienced more organizations over the years, it’s become obvious to me that very few people are willing to go through the true hardship of building a strong team.

Part of the challenge in finding the formula to building strong teams is that there’s too much information out there, too many systems and rules and sets of static principles that are available to people to read, study, and try to apply to their organization or situation. Part of the challenge is that there is no formula, and most of what is put forth in the articles and books is a palatable simplification that suggests certainty of outcomes when the reality is it is a process that takes time and experience and failure and pain and is never certain.

And here I am contributing to that ocean of information! But it’s clear that most of that ocean of information out there on the Internet and what’s taught in seminars are ineffective and often counterproductive. In the writing of this essay, I hope to further clarify the principles and processes for myself in a way that’s reproducible and creates more clarity for myself that I can bring to my own endeavors and that this exploration will benefit others as well.