Hi Reader,

Did you watch the curling at the Winter Olympics?

GB's team came so close to gold.

What makes curling compelling to watch is that it is a team sport. You cannot win it through individual excellence. The skip reads the ice, calls the shot, the sweepers respond in real time, adjust, communicate. Everyone has to represent the collective … not just their own stone.

Assemble four elite speed skaters and ask them to curl together and you won't get a curling team. You'll get four confused, talented people with brooms.

This sounds obvious. And yet…..

I know a leader who sat on a Senior Leadership Team that grew to 27 people during a restructure.

The quarterly offsites were three days long. Each leader got 30 minutes to present their area. You sat waiting for your turn - like nursery school, but with better coffee.

No hard problems got discussed. No real decisions got made. Half the room had mentally abdicated.

It was called a leadership team. It functioned like a closing ceremony … spectacular, well-attended, and completely useless as a decision-making forum.

Peter Hawkins, whose work on high performing teams I return to regularly, makes a distinction most organisations skip: the difference between a team and a working group.

Ø A working group coordinates independent activity. Everyone does their own work, reports in, aligns where needed. Entirely legitimate. Often exactly what's needed.

Ø A real team has high interdependency and mutual accountability. Members are committed to the collective enterprise - not just their own patch. Like curling.

Neither is better.

But they require completely different conditions to function well.

And they need completely different interventions when they're not working.

The problem is most organisations don't ask the question.

They call something a team, treat it like a team, invest in it like a team and then wonder why the offsite didn't shift anything.

I'm currently working with a leader on exactly this. Before we designed anything, we had to answer something more fundamental: what is this group actually for? Who needs to be in it? Does the way it operates match what the work requires?

Uncomfortable questions and the most useful thing we did before touching anything else.

If you're about to invest in your leadership team and you haven't asked those questions yet it's worth a conversation before you design anything.

​[Book a conversation →]​

Catherine