What is Your Team Structure? 

We’ve all been in situations where teams, groups or committees functioned well. We’ve also seen where they failed miserably. What makes the difference? Why do some teams excel, while others get bogged down in the minutia, stuck in bureaucracy or turn into death marches? More often than not the answer lies in the fundamental structure or organization of the team. I’ve been able to identify 5 basic organizational structures: Committee Led Manager, Committee Led Team, Authoritative Manager, Self-Organized Team and Self-Led Team. 

Committee Led Manager 

In this structure, a single manager is led by a committee of upper managers. The manager attempts to balance the request or demands of the committee, but often finds herself overruled and vetoed by one or more parties. The manager’s position is not enviable because she will inevitably find herself without any real authority. Most of her time will be spent massaging egos rather than actually getting anything done. Managers in this structure are often consumed by back to back meetings and lack sufficient time to manage their team. 

The long-term result of this model is that the manager will be overly stressed and the team will lack functional leadership. Objectives will only sometimes be accomplished. 

Committee Led Team 

While the Committee Led Manager is difficult for the manager, a Committee Led Team is chaotic for the whole team. Requests may come to the members of the team from any number of sources and the team members find themselves playing a virtual game of whack-a-mole by attempting to satisfy every request from each of the committee members. Many of these requests may be in direct contradiction to previous instructions. There is no single strategic direction and, rather than leading the team, the committee members find the majority of their time is spent on political maneuvering in an effort to convince at least a majority of the committee of a certain action. 

Teams in this situation will be pulled in too many directions to be productive. This is a common structure in political environments such as government or overly bureaucratic organizations. 

Authoritative Manager 

Managers in this situation are the single source of information for the team. They assign specific tasks and coordinate with each individual team member to get the work done. Unfortunately the team can’t really function as a team because authoritative managers maintain the ability to veto any of the decisions made by the team. This veto power is regularly exercised. 

Teams in this situation can be effective, but their effectiveness relies entirely upon the abilities of the manager. In the long-term most of these teams will find that the manager is not infallible and suffer from the fact that the manager may not consider multiple possible solutions. 

Self-Organized Team 

A Self-Organized Team does not have a formal leader and each of the team members are expected to equally contribute to both the team vision as well as team action items. Team members do feel a shared ownership for the work that they accomplish and they are generally happy in this arrangement. 

By nature self-organized teams lack a clear leader. While this often doesn’t affect the execution of work, it does leave the team without a clear vision and strategic direction. In order to survive, these teams will naturally evolve into another team structure; namely self-managed teams. 

Self-Led Team 

The biggest difference between this and a self-organized team is that this team has a leader. That is, one of the members of the team has been given the authority, by the team or through a more formal process, to give the team direction and set a long-term vision. The leader is part of the team, and they don’t view themselves as the boss. They realize that their responsibility is to set the team up for success. While the leader does have the authority to give direction, they only exercise that authority when the team is unable to quickly set a direction themselves. 

Which one of these structures are you currently working in? What needs to change? What works well?