Is Your School Filled with Pseudo-Teams?

For two decades, I have seen many schools and organizations struggle with low-performance issues. Here's my take on what's going on.

There are work groups, there pseudoteams and then there are trueteams. A few years ago, my consulting partner Burton Cohen and I coined the term trueteam to describe an end state of effective teaming. We were dissatisfied with the old saw of "Form-Storm-Norm-Perform" but we recognized the reality that teams do have a fairly predictable life cycle. Here's the concept we articulated. It has proven valid and useful over and over.

++Stage One:  Group: A group is an assemblage of disconnected individuals who experience low task focus, conflicting loyalties and jockeying for position. Groups are often assigned to function as teams without the appropriate leadership or training.

++Stage Two: PseudoTeam: A Pseudoteam emerges when group member act as they believe a team should act. Although there is increasing familiarity between the group members, there is also surface smoothness and a tendency to overcompromise. Living as a pseudoteam is frustrating because it is essentially false.

++Stage Three: AntiTeam: At some point, sometimes gradually and sometimes abruptly, the pseudoteam goes negative. The purpose of the group fragments because of growing resentment about the false fronts and overcompromising of the pseudoteam stage. Members engage in passive sabotage, withdrawing from discussions or withholding their constructive criticism. Members often slip into dysfunctional roles, such as the classic attacker—victim—rescuer triad. The AntiTeam is painful so…

++Stage Four: Crisis of Purpose & Productivity: Because the AntiTeam is not productive, members begin to challenge the group’s existence. Leaders challenge the group’s productivity and internal conflicts derail the work of the team. The crisis causes many members and leaders to question whether the team should continue.

++Stage Five: Retreat from the discomfort of conflict: Faced with the pain of the crisis, members retreat back to the comfortable familiarity of surface smoothness and artificial courtesy—in other words, they reform the pseudoteam.

++The Low Performance Loop: Many groups cycle through the pseudoteam-antiteam-crisis-retreat pattern indefinitely. They are productive, but not highly so.

There is a way around the low-performance loop. It is the method of ++Acceleration by Facilitation.++ An effective facilitator, (even when the team leader acts as a facilitator) helps the team by clarifying the task, identifying appropriate team roles and establishing a clear process for information gathering, decision-making and execution.

When a team is facilitated, it can function as a trueteam, complete with interdependence, healthy conflict, creativity, cohesiveness and high productivity. A trueteam is an extremely gratifying place to work, even though trueteams work at a very high level.

Talking about teaming and the phases of teaming is an excellent way to help a group of people skip the storm and move quickly to high productivity.