What a team is
A team is not the box on the chart
A chart draws a box around eight people and calls it a team. The box is a reporting arrangement; whether it is also a team is a separate question.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The team's managerFive of this person's six pairs are with people not in this grid
- 02The senior engineerThe one working pair on the whole team that does not involve the manager
- 03The second engineer
- 04The engineer who joined in MarchNo pair with anybody
four people · 6 possible pairs · 2 of them have worked on something together · 4 have never done either
Four of the eight, and only the pairs that run between those four.
When a team wants evidence without reducing people to a score, team productivity analytics can help connect time and project patterns to a transparent discussion about workload.
For a separate perspective on teams and working practice, consult Scaled Agile.
Somebody drew a box on a chart, put eight names in it, and wrote a word at the top. From that moment the eight people were a team, in the sense that everybody referred to them as one, invited them to things as one, and set goals for them as one. Nothing else had happened. No two of them had necessarily done anything together, and some of them had never spoken outside a meeting that forty people attended.
The box is real and it is useful. It says who approves leave, who writes the reviews, who gets asked when the work is late. But it records a reporting arrangement, and a reporting arrangement is a relationship between each person and one other person. Eight such relationships, all pointing at the same place, do not make a network. They make a wheel with a hub and no rim.
What the box actually records
Every line on a chart is a line of authority. The chart answers one question well — who is accountable for whom — and it is read as though it answered a second question that it never asked: who works with whom. The two can coincide. In a co-located team of five building one thing, they usually do. Distributed across four countries and three products, they come apart quietly, and nothing on the chart changes to show it.
This matters because almost every decision made about a team is made by looking at the chart. Budgets are allocated to boxes. Goals are set per box. Team-building money is spent per box. If the box is not the unit of work, all of that lands somewhere other than where the work is.
The useful definition
A team is the set of people between whom work actually runs. That is a definition you can check, and checking it is the whole method of this site: take the people in the box, consider every possible pair of them, and ask which of those pairs have done something together that needed both of them.
It is deliberately a low bar. Not a shared project. Not a shared goal. One piece of work, within some period you choose, that would have come out differently if either of them had not been there. A review that changed something. A problem one of them brought to the other. A thing they built in an afternoon.
On the team counted throughout this site — eight people, one quarter — six pairs met that bar out of twenty-eight possible ones, and five of the six ran through the manager. Seven of the eight had worked with somebody. Only two had worked with somebody who was not the manager. That is the shape of a wheel, and it is extremely common.
Why the distinction is not pedantry
Two things follow from it, and both cost money.
- The first is that a wheel-shaped team has one point of failure and it is a person. Everything the team knows passes through one head. Everything that needs agreement waits for one calendar. When that person is on leave, the team does not slow down; it stops being a team and becomes seven people doing individual work, which is what it mostly was.
- The second is that activities bought to improve the team are bought for the box, and the box is not where the problem is. A quiz night does not create a working pair, because no work runs through it. Everybody attends, everybody enjoys it or does not, and on Monday the same six pairs exist. The money was spent on the right eight people and the wrong relationship.
What this site does with that
Every note here applies the same test to something: an activity, a ritual, a tool, a piece of advice. Did any pair exist afterwards that did not exist before? It is a narrow question and it ignores a great deal that matters — morale, trust, whether people like each other, whether anybody wants to stay. It is not offered as the only thing worth knowing about a group of people.
It is offered because it is the one thing about a distributed team that can be counted without asking anybody how they feel, cannot be improved by saying it has improved, and does not depend on who is doing the assessing. A survey of team cohesion measures what eight people are willing to write down in a form their manager may read. A count of pairs measures what happened.
Where to start
If you take one thing from this page, make it the first exercise: write down everybody in the box, write down every pair, and mark the ones that have done something together in the last three months. It takes about twenty minutes for a team of eight and you do not need anybody's permission to do it.
The number will be lower than you expect. That is the normal result, not a sign of a broken team, and the rest of this site is about what to do with it.