Team Development – Internal or External Focus?

by Lucy Cadman

I found working as a sole trader from home could be a rather a lonely existence. I used to come into contact with many clients daily – either replying to their emails, chatting to them on forums, answering their telephone calls, or meeting them in person at their homes or whilst doing demonstrations at various events throughout the UK. But whilst I loved my customers (and indeed, I loved being loved by them), it was still lonely. I had no team around me to share either my problems or my ambitions. If something went wrong, I fixed it myself. If something needed doing, I did it myself. If a goal needed achieving, I achieved it myself. All very self-satifying … but none the less, very lonely. To thrive, a business needs good teams within it, and for me, the two are irrevocably interlinked.

Managers who wish to improve the performance of their teams often tend to focus on the team’s ‘internal workings’. They focus on subjects such as clarifying the team’s goals and roles, building spirit and motivation, providing focused agendas and agreeing rules for decision making. However, a book written by Deborah Ancona (Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management) and Henrik Bresman (INSEAD) states that these attributes alone are not enough to ensure that a team is successful.

The authors have harnessed decades of their research and documented their findings in their book X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead Innovate and Succeed. While Ancona and Bresman recognize the importance of the ‘internal workings’ of a team, they also saw that the most successful teams (which they dub the X-Teams) had team spirit, but that they also projected ‘upwards and outwards’ from the team. They established co-operative relationships, sought out key information from other teams and outside sources, communicated the team's mission to key stakeholders and actively pursued support from management. The poorest-performing teams, on the other hand, just focused on their own inner workings and relationships.

While the phrase ‘X-Team’ is relatively new, the idea that successful teams need to go outside themselves is less so. Margerison and McCann identified that all successful teams at some time in their life have to interact with others external to themselves. Margerison and McCann’s specifically identified two activities in their Types of Work Model relating to this issue:

• Advising - involves the team gathering information from others and disseminating it to the rest of the team so that it can be used effectively.
• Promoting - which means selling the ‘benefits’ of the team and what the team does not only to key stakeholders, but also to those who will be responsible for making things work further down the line, both internally and externally to the organisation.

So what are the implications for managers who wish to develop their own teams? Clearly the traditional ‘internal’ focus of goals, roles, team behaviours and team ways of working are a vital basis for building a team. However, this is only half of the solution. Managers also need to identify and build relationships with others both internal and external to the organisation. Managers should challenge themselves and their team by asking: Who does the team need support from? Who else has a stake in what our team does? Who might need to know about what we are doing? By doing this, as researchers have identified, managers can cultivate the type of environment that will make their teams more successful.

Would your Managers benefit from Management Development Training to help them integrate both internal and external working methods into their teams? If so, please contact Developing People Limited on 0845 409 2346 for more information.