What is your team's purpose?

What is your team supposed to do that no other team does?

These are important questions for all teams - whether you belong to a management team, a functional team, a project team, or other.

The challenge in most organizations is that teams don't have clarity about their purpose. They brush it off as something too fluffy to consider. Or, for other teams, their purpose ends up on a pretty poster in a conference room and does nothing but take up wall space.

Here is the second excerpt from our recent article on 3 Ways to Derail Team Formation.

In Part 1 of this post I talked about the first mistake that derails team formation - Ambiguity of team purpose and vision for the future.

Here's Mistake #2...

Hiring a warm body instead of the right person

Below is an excerpt from our latest article 3 Ways to Derail Team Formation.

Most teams struggle to reach their highest levels of effectiveness because of their inability to cultivate the right team of people from the beginning. As a result, communication breakdowns, unnecessary conflict, and poor decision making leads to a loss of key opportunities.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The last three posts have been focused on overcoming challenges encountered on remote teams. Part 1 was focused on getting your virtual team aligned, Part 2 on building cohesion, and Part 3 on creating disciplined team processes.

Today's post is focused on remote team leadership.

Working on teams where some or all team members are remote is becoming the norm rather than the exception. And frankly, having remote team members adds complexity that often times accelerates and amplifies communication breakdowns.

For example,

I recently worked with a team in Fort Collins, Colorado helping them build alignment and cohesion.

The CEO was a technologist. The Sales VP wanted to see a more sales-driven organization. The Engineering VP needed more engineers to meet the demands of a singificant customer contract. The CFO wanted to instill process and financial discipline. The HR VP was mostly focused on administration.

Each person came to the team with his/her own agenda and vision.

The team was a mess.

I am excited about our upcoming webinar Laser Focused: 3 Keys to Getting Senior Leadership Teams Aligned for 2011.

When: December 9, 2010; 12:00 - 12:47 mountain time

This webinar is meant to be a practical program for senior leadership teams, giving them tools to increase team effectiveness. What I have found throughout my experience over the past 17 years working with senior leadership teams is that they deal with some unique challenges that often limit their productivity and cohesion.

In the first two parts of this article, I discussed the impact that senior leadership teams have on their organization. The behaviors that begin at the senior leadership team level ripple through an organization, and just like a wave that grows as it nears its shore, those behaviors also grow and get repeated - regardless of whether they have a positive or negative impact on the organization.

In almost any leadership book you read about, you'll hear that having a vision is important. But, for many people, the idea alone is difficult to understand. And, as a result, having a vision becomes elusive.

Getting clear about your vision for the team isn’t rocket science, and most leaders make it more complicated than it needs to be. It is simply being able to communicate the purpose of the team, where you would like the team to be, and how you would like the team to get there.

Do you work in an environment where:

• People are constantly running around focused on pressing matters instead of being able to think about the big picture.
• There is never time to do anything except put out the latest and loudest fire.
• The organization expects to move quickly but it crushes critical thinking and debate.
• It is the norm to work 60+ hours per week.

How about an environment where: