Too Many Cooks
We have all felt this feeling at one point in our personal or professional lives… A situation where it is nearly impossible to complete a task without a team, but it feels nearly impossible to complete it with a team. Everyone is disagreeing, people are just not listening, there’s a fire in the kitchen and everyone is arguing about the way to hold a knife. Starting off with a new group is absolutely mayhem, but this is something that improves over time. The keyword here is time.
Every group dynamic starts out with a disjointed feeling. In general, the beginnings of a group are several people who have a similar task that they would like to complete and a similar lack of more than two arms. Simple. The beginnings of a group are clunky because no one knows what their role is. Some people do not want to lead, some cannot exist without feeling like a leader. Some people want to feel challenged, some do not want the pressure of completing the more difficult tasks. One of the best things you can do for yourself and for your future groups is to decide where you stand on what type of role you like to fill. That way, even if you don’t have the opportunity to fill that role, you are entering the situation with something in mind and experience to relate your plan to.
The stages described above are the forming and storming stages of group development. You have covered the initial ensemble of minds and you have witnessed the bloodbath of power struggle and role delegation. Now you can finally get to work. This is a point at which you may feel like you are a little bit distant from the group and a little bit on your own. Everyone is feeling this at this point. You all spent a certain amount of time planning and now you need to get started on the work. The most important thing to do here is to consider your team as a resource. This will help normalize the decided upon dynamic. Do you have a team leader? Great, now you don’t have plan out the next several high level steps. That’s their job. You just have to do what you came to do. Is there someone championing breaks and morale? Awesome, now someone is probably going to order lunch so you can keep up and remind you to breathe every once in awhile. The moment you begin to trust the system and dynamic created by your group structure, the moment you can take opportunity to unload certain parts of your routine onto others.
This unloading of small portions of your responsibility to those that have been delegated the roles that would handle those operations gives you superpowers. Now you can complete the task that you already know how to do with exponentially more focus and significantly less interruptions. This is only achievable through trust and normalization of the group structure. Now you are all ready to perform.
This level of group development can also be considered "flow state", in which you are able to operate at a much higher level than if you were all working alone. You believe in the abilities and roles of your team and you know that if someone is grabbing a task, they are doing so knowing their ability to complete it. Now you are going to be able to power through to your goal and finish the work for the deadline. At this point you may be having too much fun to even notice that you are nearing the end of the function of this group.
This is why it is important to trust in the process of group development. No team can function in a flow state until they get through the initial stages of developing and normalizing the structure of that team. But once you get there, nothing can stop you.