When Teams Fail

I have over fifteen years of team building experience as an educator, consultant, facilitator and "hands-on" team leader. I've seen some great successes with teams including companies that attribute substantial increases in performance to their teams. I've also seen some miserable failures, even to the extent that some companies may never try a team approach again. My years of observing successful teams, marginal teams, and failures has lead me to one solid conclusion about teams that fail.

When teams fail it is rarely the employees on the team that fail. Usually its the managers who fail the team. Through a lack of direction. Or a lack of support. Or insufficient resources. Or canceling the team effort without explanation or justification. Or any other of a number of reasons.

When the teams fail, I find those failures often reinforce the belief of many employees that management "never follows through on its initiatives, so why should we bother?"

Successful team efforts can provide extraordinary benefits to companies, and I encourage companies to use teams and support them in the proper way. But when companies approach me about a major team building initiative, I always give them this caution: "Don't start this process unless you are serious and committed and are willing to do what it takes to make the team efforts successful. If you start this and fail, you'll do far more damage to your company than if you never started the team effort in the first place."


About me: Dan Pelley conducts employee involvement and team building programs in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. His most popular programs include "Team Participation Skills," and "Team-Oriented Problem Solving." Both are "hands on programs."

Copyright © 2009 Daniel W. Pelley
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