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Big Picture Blur

April 29, 2003

"The first way to spot a directionless team is to ask yourself if its members lack a clear overall picture of their desired future.  Because they're unable to visualize a scenario for success, they don't understand how their separate day-to-day activities are of any value in supporting the performance of large-scale business objectives, and they often simply go through the motions to perform their functions.  For the average team member, the experience is a bit like trying to visualize the planned redesign of a room by looking through the keyhole.

Because team members don't have a good understanding of how their individual functions fit together, they can't respond to questions or address issues that lie outside their immediate field of vision.  You've probably experienced this if you've ever made a phone call to ask a simple question and received a response such as, 'Sorry, but I can't answer that.  Sally's the only person who knows the answer and she's on vacation for two weeks.'  This limited point of view plays an important role in discouraging team accountability, for if team members don't understand the jobs of their coworkers it becomes a lot easier to define their own jobs as just those work activities that take place within their own cubicles.  To an outside observe, such a work group looks like a series of disconnected, isolated workers, not a coherent team (Barner, 2000, p.151)."

Reference:  Barner, R. W. (2000).  Team troubleshooter: how to find and fix team problems.  Palo Alto, CA:  Davies-Black Publishing.

Does your team have a clear vision?

Team Troubleshooter is available on loan from the Ohio State University Leadership Center.  A complete listing of all the Leadership Center's resources is available on our website http://leadershipcenter.osu.edu/

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Created: 2008-12-22, Updated: 2009-01-09