Thought I’d share this question-and-answer exchange between myself and another leader. Our subject – TEAMS.

Q: What is the biggest challenge facing teams in organizations right now?

A: I believe the enduring challenges for teams are engagement, ownership and accountability -- Engagement with the team's purpose and with the power of teams generally; Ownership of each person's role, capacity, and responsibility to make a contribution; Accountability to the other members of the team and to the larger organization/business or community/stakeholders being served. These are the things that separate teams from groups, and meaningful progress from a series of meetings.

Q: What have you found to be the best way to encourage individual team members to recognize and then set aside individual ego's and agenda's in service of the greater team goal?"

A: Tough question! We build cultures that evaluate and reward individual performance, and then seem puzzled when teams don't blossom. The road to good teams begins with creating a team-honoring culture.

Second, I believe that without a compelling vision for the whole organization, nothing moves forward. Tell them we need to "go to the moon" and all of a sudden you can get lots of people working together to create and respond to challenges.

Lastly, when people see the team as "extra," disconnected with their primary responsibilities, or encumbering their personal objectives, the team is destined to fail. This is a particularly difficult challenge -- we build our workforce on specialists, with a rigid sense of personal "job description" instead of group goals, and then we turn around and ask people to operate as generalists and work collaboratively in teams.

But in direct answer to your question - the best way I have found to get people to work in high-impact teams is to convince them that (1) the team has an important purpose, (2) the team can accomplish way more together than as individuals, and (3) that the team has lots of room for servant leaders, and for wildly responsible people, but not for disengagement, selfish egos and agendas. Teams must focus on what they can create together. Teams are not about personal power - they are about shared responsibility and increased effectiveness.