Here is the third 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. Part 2 focused on the mistake of - Hiring a warm body instead of the right person Here's Mistake #3... Dis-orientation Most team members are hired and then thrown into the fire.

Another  common and costly leader mistake that can result in a loss of  credibility and trust.

MISTAKE: Drawing clear lines in the sand.

The challenge in many organizations is that most leaders don’t get to know their people well enough to create a motivating environment. They like to draw lines in the sand between business and personal.

Actually, our business and personal lives often intersect and have a huge impact on each other.We need to make business personal.

"The conduct of a company's leadership team is directly correlated with the organization's long-term performance."

In her article Lessons from Team Fumbles, Susan Lucia Annunzio goes on to say "Once-venerable institutions such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Royal Bank of Scotland paid the ultimate price for the behaviors of their leadership teams."

Some of the behaviors Annunzio is referring to includes:

Have you ever watched a 400-meter relay team work?
On a good team, their hand-offs are impeccable.

In fact, given two teams of equal quality runners, the team with the more efficient
hand-offs always wins. The same holds true in the work place.

The concept of "team building" means different things to different people. Over the past 9 years I have spent a ton of time with hundreds of clients and thousands of people creating successful team building programs. Our shorter programs may span only four to eight hours in duration, and our programs focused on helping teams make a significant shift in how they collaborate may last over 9 months.

Regardless of how long the program is, I have always defined team building in three ways:

1. It is a tool to help accelerate team formation.

I recently wrote a three-part series on reluctant new managers. One cause of reluctance that I wrote about was due to a fear of losing control (which often leads to a reluctance to delegate, hand over responsibilities, etc.).

I recently came across an article called When Teams Work Best by Frank LaFasto and Carl Larson and within their article they deal with a similar issue head on. And I quote: "The best way to manage your personal control needs as team leader is to demonstrate behaviors that share control.

One of the most frustrating experiences people can have in the workplace is when there are unspoken expectations between a team member and a manager.

In a typical employment situation, certain expectations, such as salary, hours, and job duties, are clearly understood by both employer and employee. Other expectations, however, are so intimately linked to an individual’s concept of work that they often go unspoken or unacknowledged.