There is no such thing as group development

Can I help?

There are 66 connections in a 12-person team. A 4-hour workshop plus a 20-minute break. So, a mere 3.33 minutes will be allotted for each pair.

And why is this a problem?

It’s not a problem.

Only when you want to develop a team, keep in mind next to this number that a team does not develop as a team. As my younger daughter used to say, I surely quoted her already because the concept of a team is an object that doesn't exist.

A team cannot develop. The quality of all connections within them, well, that can. But there are a hell lot of them.

Now, if such a small amount of time is allocated for such a connection, even if the group is small enough, then almost no time is allocated, then how should you develop your teams? Well, if you are a regular blog reader, and according to analytics, the odds are 9:10 that you have been reading for at least three years, then you already know that I will conclude that either you entrust the team development to the leader, or you shouldn’t bother at all.

It's not a waste, just it’s advisable to perform the above operation beforehand to keep your expectations in check.

Assume that you've got a candid, straightforward, fast, and brave coach - and there’s no other kind with us :) -, well, they also have exactly this much time to add any value to the team’s operation. During this, they need to build trust, achieve that you are willing to accept feedback, plant a metaphor, get half a sentence out that you all will remember. And three months later, when someone hears it back from someone’s mouth, they will know they have succeeded. Only they will know, but life doesn’t have to treat every job equally fairly. In exchange, we can work with others every day, see, it’s not a bad deal either.

We’ve written about group dynamics many times, maybe last here. If you ask me, I think the quality of a leader’s work should only be measured in this one indicator, another question of course is that it doesn’t seem like an ideal indicator, given that it’s immeasurable. Or not well.

Our work, as leadership developers, is in whether we are able to teach leaders how to deal with a team. Here, by the way, we all quickly bleed out, especially because the combinatorics hasn’t changed much in the last three paragraphs. Now, if you have to deal with a leader in a group with eleven others for two hundred and twenty minutes, exactly the corresponding number of AHA-experiences can be expected.

Because development is always individual work.

Even if there are few of you, even if we work together with a hundred people. Parallel, individual development is happening, through those connections that we counted above. If you can properly measure the key people in the teams (and intuition can develop at a brutal pace for this, entering the room within ten minutes you can take off who pulls down, and who pulls up the team. And it’s not always the upward that’s the most useful, mind you, often the real learning comes from the reaction of the person pulling the dynamics down - for the entire team.), and manage to move them, then the others will follow too.

But space and time are finite, if the given team leader does not put their 220 working days a year into the question, then the few hours spent with an external coach for the team are quite useless.

So, whether as a leader or as an HR person, if you are constantly cutting budgets anyway, cut those team development initiatives as well, where without the given leader being able or wanting to spend any time on their team, you purchase developments from outside, hoping that they will work better from it. They won’t.

Maybe they will see more clearly that they don’t work well. But this will still be somewhat unsellable as development :)