Teams and shared purpose

Some time back, I ran across some powerful wisdom described in a podcast with Dr Richard Boyatzis hosted by Dr Krister Lowe at the Team Coaching Zone. Listening to Dr Boyatzis describe his long history in coaching and research was both humbling and fascinating and there is enough material in this 45 minute podcast for many blog posts. I took particular notice of the suggestion that a sense of shared purpose may just be the key element of a great team and the suggestion that the creation of a sense of shared purpose should be high on the to-do list for any manager worth their salt.

However, there are some subtle complexities to this very powerful idea. Simply putting people together in an org structure won’t make a great team. Similarly, the presence of a common goal will not, on its own, create this sense of purpose. This is a straightforward scenario for organisations of all types. Even universities do it with undergrad and postgrad students. Think back to your tutorials early in the new semester where the groups are decided for the group assessment project element of the unit.  We create an organisational setting for the team by setting assessment requirements and describing the expectations of the tutors. However, experience suggests that the growth of the relationships between the team members and (most importantly I say) between the individual team members and the goals to be achieved have much less structure to them.

The thinking for teams practitioners then becomes what to do in this space. On some level, this is what team building practice promises to provide for business teams. However, while team building has its supporters (eg. this piece in Forbes from 2016 – Forbes Team Building article), there is little structure and process to be observed here either. Do we affect participants in team building workshops? I think so – especially if positive emotion is at work. But whether these activities have an impact on this sense of shared purpose is still an unknown and there are opportunities to grow the structure and rigour of the thinking here.

The participants in the podcast used the phrase “helping the team to find its’ rhythm,” which perfectly sums up the job ahead for those working with professional teams.

Stay tuned for more on the subject of shared purpose in future posts.

The podcast hosted by the Team Coaching Zone can be found here (The Team Coaching Zone is a great resource, by the way).

https://teamcoachingzone.com/richard_boyatzis