Stop Treating Every Group Like a Team

Not every group of people reporting to the same person should be treated as a single team.

In this episode of The Leader’s Kitbag, I share a personal story that highlights what happens when we force people into team structures that don’t reflect how they actually work together.

It’s a real-world example of what I talked about in the previous episode: if your people don’t share goals, aren’t interdependent, and don’t hold each other accountable, they’re not a team – and you need to lead them differently.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why cramming non-teams into team routines wastes time
• How to structure meetings for different types of groups
• A better way to connect people without forcing false collaboration

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In the last episode of The Leaders Kitbag, I discussed the idea that not every group of people in the workplace is actually a team. 

Just because we call a group of people a team doesn’t mean it actually is one. 

If you missed that episode, go and watch or listen to it next. 

It’s only 5 minutes long and will provide value. 

In this episode, I’m going to share some practical tips to help you get the best from the team, work group or collection of individuals that you lead. 

Here’s a quick story of mine to help you understand how we need to change our approach to leadership and management, depending on what we’re actually leading. 

I once had a boss whom another colleague and I reported to. 

My colleague, our teams and our boss formed a team. 

That boss also had another manager who reported to them, who led a small team. Together, they were another team. 

And finally, that boss had another individual who reported to them… whose work had nothing at all to do with the rest of us reporting to my boss. 

If we go back to the definition of a team that I explored in the last episode of the Leaders Kitbag, you’ll remember that a team has three characteristics. 

• Shared Goals 

• Inter-dependence 

• Mutual Accountability. 

By this definition, we can see that my boss at the time was actually leading two teams, and had one additional direct report. 

Now, the mistake that they made, which, to be fair, I would have made at that stage in my career too, was to think they had one team. 

Each week, we’d squeeze into a poorly lit meeting room that was too small for us all to fit in. 

I give my updates as requested, and on a particularly busy day, would then sit listening to the other updates that had absolutely nothing to do with me, getting frustrated because of all the things I could be getting on with instead. 

This is what happens when you use team-building tools, structures and routines, when you don’t actually have a team. 

Instead, we could have had a less frequent all hands meeting with key updates,  or we could have got those by email. 

We could have then had shorter team meetings in our real teams. 

We could have had weekly lunches and occasional nights out together for the sake of human-to-human connection, which is so important in the workplace, but skipped working on effective collaboration and communication when there was no need to collaborate. 

So, as you can see…having people reporting to you doesn’t always mean you have a team. 

And that means you need to think carefully about how you structure meetings…and how best to use people’s most precious resource, time.