How does a group of experts become a team?

There’s a leadership problem I have struggled with over and over again in my career. I’ve been fortunate to have the chance to lead teams of specialists, people who are deployed into difficult or complex situations, who are gifted in making sense, making decisions and figuring out solutions. They have sometimes been called architects, and they have sometimes been called consultants, but they have always been smart people who make a difference wherever they go. Let’s call a team like this a team of distributed experts.

There are many problems with running such a team. It can be hard to find the right people. It can be hard to keep people motivated in the face of never-ending, apparently insurmountable problems. It can be hard to win the respect and advocacy of the people you are trying to help. But when you get it right, the team is never big enough and is always in demand.

And that is the root of the problem I have struggled to solve. When you have a team of architects or consultants who are continuously in demand, it is possible for everybody to be fully focused on the work in front of them, to give themselves fully to that work, to be very successful - and yet to interact rarely with their fellow team members. Every individual is doing a great job, but the team is not a team.

As ever, the first step in addressing any problem is to ask whether it is truly a problem. Does it matter if a group of highly talented people deliver outstanding results, yet don’t truly form as a team? Perhaps there isn’t really a place for this team. Perhaps it should be dissolved into the teams that the members are working with. Perhaps the team should accept its status as ‘not really a team’ and operate as a group of loosely affiliated individuals.

I’ve tried these different approaches, and they can be made to work. However, I think that these approaches lose the distinctive value that comes from a group of expert specialists who share a purpose, who support each other through challenges, and who have a distinctive career path. I also think that work is better when you are part of a team of people who understand and value what you do: belonging and trust are two of the main reasons for coming to work in the morning.

I don’t claim to have solved this problem, but I have encountered it often enough that I have found some tools that seem to work. All of these are familiar, but they are also often ignored.

Shared mission and vision: despite all of the research showing the importance of purpose to motivation and fulfilment at work, mission and vision statements often have a bad name. I think that this is because many such statements aren’t really mission and vision statements: they’re bureaucratic mush (‘proactively support our stakeholders in the realisation of business value etc. etc.’). I believe that it is worth the trouble to state clearly what you stand for and why you exist, and to say it in simple language that everyone understands. The process of expressing this shared mission and vision together (rather than simply receiving it from the leader) also assists team formation.

One key tip, though: whatever approach you take to define your mission and vision, find the writer in your team who can turn it into a short, inspirational statement. Writing by committee is a route back to that bureaucratic mush.

Shared understanding: just as mission and vision statements have a bad name, team building exercises have a bad name. They prompt the image of struggling over assault courses at the weekend, raising flagpoles in the rain, and building bridges out of lego and paper straws. I think that such exercises have their place, but that the exercises which help most in team formation are those which engage our minds and help us understand each other. There is a wide range of tools which have a similar form: conduct a survey, use that survey to deliver insights and share them as a team with a facilitator. We can question the science behind some of these tools, but I believe that the individual tool and the specific survey results matter less than the creation of an environment and a context in which people can talk about themselves, their personality and their motivations. Whatever the tool, I believe that such exercises generate self awareness and team awareness, and that both are precious.

Shared work: finally, the most obvious way of coming together as a team is to to work together. Many teams of distributed experts have great ambitions to do this. They are smart enough to realise that, in their individual roles, they encounter the same problems over and over again. They wish that they had time to take a breath, to crystallise their experience into knowledge that will benefit them and the people who come after them. But this time never seems to be available: there is always the next problem or the next assignment. I believe that this is where the leader can help most. It is part of the leader’s role to advocate for the space to do this work, to configure their team in a way where this work is recognised as important. Of course, this is difficult, as, on any given day, nothing seems quite as important as that day’s immediate challenges. One technique which the leader can adopt is to deliberately create urgency for shared work by, for example, scheduling a big set piece presentation to a large group of people. It’s a bit like publishing your New Year’s resolutions - you are deliberately creating additional motivation to do the thing that you know you should be doing anyway.

I don’t claim that these approaches fully solve the problem of forming a team from a group of distributed experts, but they have helped me often enough to earn their place in my leadership toolkit. If you’ve got techniques that work for you, please share them in the comments.