How Harnessing the Power of Groups Will Help You Build Great Teams

All too often, people think of groups as a “lesser than” form of a team. Someone will comment, “They’re just a group; they don’t work together as a team!” The reality is that groups and teams exist for very different reasons. A Group convenes to help its members achieve their individual goals. A Team works together to realize a collective goal or create a shared work product. Such teams may involve a business team developing an innovative product or a sports team seeking to win a world title.

Regarded among the greatest basketball coaches of all time, Phil Jackson once said, “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.”  If you want a stronger team, it stands to reason that you should create a mechanism to maximize the potential of its individual members. Teams are not cut out to do that. The good news is that’s what groups are specifically designed to do. Groups that work alongside teams operationalize learning, create better alignment and engagement, strengthen teams, tear down silos, foster greater synergy, improve relationships, and boost employee mental health.

Case Study: Why 

Nearly two years ago, a CEO who has been a CEO Peer Advisory Group member for more than a decade, approached me about wanting to start company groups for 24 plant managers across the US. After reflecting on how much his CEO group (comprised of other CEOs from non-competing businesses who share the common challenge of leading a company) had helped him grow as a CEO over the years, he wanted my help in creating and facilitating groups for the plant managers, believing it would accelerate their growth as well.

To provide some context, the plant managers lead operations in remote areas of the country. Other than formal company meetings, these individuals had very little interaction with one another. If they had a question or needed help, they did not have the relationships with their fellow plant managers that made it easy to ask each other.

How 

The idea was to establish groups outside the formal company structure, where the plant managers could meet in a confidential setting to learn from one another and build relationships over time that would transcend their monthly meetings.

Challenges 

What these groups would look like was guided by several challenges:

1. The group meetings had to be conducted virtually.
2. The meetings had to be both efficient and effective.
3. The groups had to be large enough to offer sufficient diversity of thought yet small enough to encourage active engagement.
4. The group members needed to share common challenges.
5. The group meetings needed to work for everyone’s schedules to promote consistent participation.
6. The group meetings had to provide an experience that was different from a typical company meeting because we wanted to provide a safe environment that would help them, first and foremost, build rapport and grow as individual team members.

What 

We selected Circles Space over Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other familiar platforms because it provides the necessary tools for promoting deep conversations. It’s also so visually different from any other available option that it sends the message to everyone in the group that this gathering differs from their typical meeting. The Circles Space agenda-setting function and team member support allowed us to create highly efficient and effective 90-minute group meetings. Using Circles Space helped us meet challenges 1, 2, and 6.

We met challenges 3-5 by organizing three groups of eight members for the company’s East, Central, and West regions. This approach helped us create ideal-sized virtual groups that shared common regional challenges and time zones for more relevant interactions and ease of scheduling.

Outcomes 

After 18 months of my leading these groups, the groups will be self-facilitated going forward, and we are establishing new groups for other areas of the company. To that end, I credit the group members, their willingness to trust the process, and the spirit of generosity they displayed from Day 1 for their impressive growth and development.

They don’t feel isolated anymore. They call each other between meetings, visit each other’s plants, and know which plant manager to ask for help with whatever challenge may come their way. Their group has helped each of them hone their craft and become a team that has brought incalculable value to the company. In the words of one of the members during the last meeting I facilitated, he said, “We moved from knowing one another’s names on an email list to becoming brothers.”

Summary 

Organizing groups that can help your teams accomplish whatever you’d like them to achieve is a powerful strategy and necessary for meeting the challenges of a future we can barely imagine. Will AI serve as a critical tool in this endeavor? Of course. AI alone won’t be enough, however. It will require harnessing our collective intelligence and leaning on our peers more effectively than we ever have to win the day. Imagine what organizing groups (virtual or in-person) could do for your organization. Then, stop imagining and start doing.

Written by Leo Bottary.

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