When a Group Becomes a Team

A group becomes a team when all members align on the same Purpose, Outcomes, and Methods (POM), and each makes meaningful progress on the Methods that lead to the Outcomes. It also helps performance a great deal when team members know their Top 5 CliftonStrengths themes and use them to the team's advantage. People can share a manager, a weekly meeting, and a department name and still be a group, because none of those things tells them what they are working toward or how their pieces connect. A group can deliver coordinated results once its members agree on the Outcomes they want and the Methods they will use to reach them.

Leaders often call a group a team to set a tone of camaraderie and to encourage people to work together, and the definition gives a leader a way to check whether the group has what it needs to live up to the name.

Alignment Starts With the Same Answers

Positive Leadership draws the POM as a bridge. On one side is the Purpose, which is the why. On the other side are the Outcomes, which are the what, the desired reality the group is trying to reach. The Methods are the how, and they form the bridge that connects the two.

Alignment on the POM means each member would give the same answers to the same questions if they were asked separately. What is the group's focus, and why does it matter? What will be true when we make meaningful progress, and how will we know? How are we going to get there?

A group can agree on the Purpose and split on the Outcomes or the Methods. A hospital unit can be united around safe patient care as its Purpose while one charge nurse believes this year's Outcome is fewer patient falls, and another believes it is lower staff turnover. Each will spend the year pushing a different problem and wonder why the other seems distracted, so a unit where both nurses are working hard still ends up with two half-finished efforts where it needed one finished one.

A company can spend a year and a half and more than a million dollars on a culture initiative without its leaders ever agreeing on what the initiative is for, and if eight of those leaders were asked separately, they could give five different answers. By our definition they would still be a group, because each leader would be pursuing a different idea of success.

Leaders in that position rarely ask the question because each assumes the answer is obvious, and each person's obvious answer is different. The disagreement comes to light months later, when the results are thin, and nobody can explain why so much effort produced so little. A team settles the POM questions early and writes the answers down, so members can return to them when a decision gets hard or when a new person joins and needs to know what the group has already agreed on.

Agreement Has to Turn Into Progress

Shared answers take a group part of the way toward becoming a team, and the rest of the definition asks whether each member is making meaningful progress on the Methods.

In the POM, the Methods follow a set order. They begin with the factors necessary, which are the strategies, the things that must be true to reach the Outcomes. Each factor necessary is rated for where it is now against where it needs to be. Next come the tactics, which are chosen to move each factor necessary. Last come the operations, the specific actions with an owner and a date. Operations are the part of the POM that produces results. When a plan has no owned operations, the Outcomes are no closer on the last day of the quarter than they were on the day the plan was written.

On a working team, each person can point to the operation they own. They can also say which factor necessary it moves. Each person knows which colleagues' operations their own progress depends on, because the Methods connect one person's tasks to the next person's. When one member's operation stalls, the people waiting on it notice.

Talent Helps Decide Who Does What

A team that already shares a POM and is making meaningful progress on it gets more from each member when people know each other's Top 5 themes and hand out tactics and operations with those themes in mind. CliftonStrengths describes 34 talent themes, and Positive Leadership defines talent as a pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that can be productively applied to an activity. Every team member has a different mix. A team that knows those mixes can divide the Methods in a way that plays to them.

A member high in Strategic usually sees more than one route to an outcome and picks the best one quickly. That makes the person useful when a tactic stops working. A member high in Achiever has the stamina for the daily operations that the rest of the POM depends on. In a group that has never discussed its themes, those two people may be handed tasks at random, and each one then spends energy on tasks that tire them. Meanwhile, a colleague who would do those same tasks well is busy with an assignment that fits them poorly.

Positive Leadership uses a formula for how talent grows into strength: Talent × (Knowledge + Skill) = Strength. Knowledge is the technical or experiential insight an activity requires, and skill is the ability to perform the steps of that activity. A strength is a level of performance that can range from oblivious to mastery. Because talent multiplies the other two, an hour of learning and practice produces more growth for someone with talent for the activity. The operations in a POM give each member regular chances to add knowledge and skill, since every operation is an activity someone has to perform. A member high in Strategic who is asked to rethink a stalled tactic learns more about the problem each time and gets better at the steps, and the team gets a better tactic out of the exchange.

Talent also explains many of the clashes between people who work closely together. Someone high in Harmony may keep an objection to themselves in a meeting to avoid conflict. A teammate high in Command may take the silence as agreement and push ahead. When both know their themes, they can see the pattern, and the person with the objection can raise it without the conversation turning personal.

Checking a Group Against the Definition

A leader can test a group by asking each member, one at a time, to write down the Purpose, the Outcomes, and the Methods. If the answers match, the leader can look at the tactics and then the operations. Every factor necessary should have at least one tactic tied to it, and every tactic should break into operations with an owner and a date. After that, have a conversation about whether people know each other's Top 5 themes, and whether those themes relate to who took which operation.