Are You Building ‘Adhesive’ or ‘Cohesive’ Teams?
Are you the ‘glue’ that holds your team together? If so, sorry, you’re NOT creating the right environment for building and sustaining high-performance teams.
Adhesive teams require that the leader – or the ‘adhesive’ team member – is present for the team to come together and work effectively as a team.
Cohesive teams naturally come together due to the environment in which they work (including their attitudes about the others on the team). The members of these teams respect each other, trust each other, and depend upon each other.
So adhesive teams have a significant weakness. That weakness is that they require constant attention and the ‘presence’ of the leader for them to perform. If the leader is not around the team doesn’t perform to their potential. There tends to be bickering and mistrust when the leader isn’t around. These teams aren’t confident in their ability to work together and are often ineffective at solving problems or resolving issues on their own. While the leader is around, things run relatively smoothly, but that’s as far as it goes. And I see this a lot in the coaching work I do.
Cohesive teams have grown beyond the stage of needing to have their ‘glue’ around to keep working together well. The team members have learned to trust and respect each other. They know the strengths and weaknesses of each player on the team and they accept the bad with the good – knowing we’re all human. They tend to leverage and trust the strengths of each team member and show each other grace in those areas where they not great. (They also work to minimize the amount of time anyone needs to work in an area of weakness.) They tend to cover for each other, and are happy to do so, because they know they will be ‘covered for’, too.
The Leaders Impact
Many leaders strive to be the one who holds their team together and helps them perform at their best. While this sounds good on the surface, it turns out to be a rather self-centered view that quickly constrains the long term performance of the team.
And the real challenge is that many leaders actually strive (only) to build adhesive teams. These leaders tend to ‘need to be needed’, and like playing the role of ‘answer-person’. They are happy to arbitrate disagreements and be the ultimate judge and decision-maker. They usually simple aren’t aware of how this approach holds back the team and limits the overall effectiveness and value of the leader, themselves.
The positive potential of this approach is constrained by the availability of the leader. Once the leader can no longer be present, the team’s performance falls off. The team members quickly reverent to their ‘old way of doing things’, which tends to be far less effective.
Sadly, this can go on for many years in a leader’s career and only when they simply begin to get tired and over-worked (even though it is self-inflicted) do they begin to look for other approaches and begin to realize the consequences of their approach.
Building Cohesive Teams Requires a Different Approach
It requires a leader to intentionally…
- Know each team member: Know their strengths, their weaknesses, what they care about, and what’s important to them. Know what motivates them and what environment they work best in. Know how best to reward and/or recognize them.
- Position each team member to their strengths: Each of us are good at some things and not-so-good at others. The action of positioning people to their strengths is as rare as it is obviously valuable. (I’ve found that ‘common sense’ is rarely ‘common practice’ in the real world.) Typically leaders simply don’t do it. They don’t think about what the person can do [best]. Instead they simply think about ‘what they need done’, then ask the closest person to do it.
- Let all members of the team know each other’s strengths and weaknesses: This isn’t as much of an ‘aha moment’ as most leaders seem to think. The members of the team are pretty good at knowing who’s good at one thing and who’s better doing something else. The leader often seems to think they are the only one ‘in the know’. Not so. But if there isn’t open and honestly discussion, then there is often a mismatch of work. But this open sharing creates a much tighter team bond. And that’s the key. This is a major step in building cohesive teams.
- Edify each member of the team for their contributions (in the manner they want): Openly thank people for their contribution in their areas of strengths. This encourages each team member and reinforces across the team that the person can be trusted in what they do. Each team member realizes their value and what they contribute to the overall success of the team.
So if you want to build cohesive team that have the resilience to perform in all types of environments strive to build teams that don’t require you to be the glue that holds them together. This may require that you change your thinking, but doing so will have a significant positive impact – for both you and the team.
