Team Dynamics
No matter what special conditions apply to it, a team is a group of people. Teams are subject to psychological dynamics — the invisible forces that influence the members of a group and that come about whenever people spend time together. The more you know about a team's dynamics, the better chance you have of helping them work effectively toward team goals.
Personalities
Undoubtedly in your life you've found people who were simpatico, with whom you hit it off as though you had known each other for years. You've also had the opposite experience of a new acquaintance, one with whom you mixed about as well as oil and water. With the vast majority of people, you probably don't have a particularly strong positive or negative reaction.
Telling people to stop having a problem with each other will do little good because they will often start internally justifying their actions. Through coaching, you can set each one on course to find a way to live with the other. They don't have to be good friends; they just have find ways of working with and around each other.
These personal attractions and repulsions are as potent a force as the effect you get when you bring two magnets together. They will happen, to one degree or another, between every two members of your team. Ironically, either attraction or repulsion can be a source of either positive or negative outcomes. Either extreme can shut out others on the team. Two people who are thick as thieves may not let others in, and a pair that is at each other's throats can create a poisonous atmosphere. Still, a mild attraction can facilitate cooperation and smooth operations among all members, and a mild repulsion could turn into a competitiveness that, if harnessed by the individuals, could spur each on to greater achievement.
You cannot eliminate these forces, but you can try to get them to work in your favor. Encourage efficient working of the team without polarizing members. If there are strong personality forces at work, assign them to different aspects of the team's goals. You can even separate them physically if necessary so proximity does not breed either greater antagonism or focus. In bad cases, you might find that you have to replace one or more team members to keep things on track.
Looking for Cliques
Cliques might seem like something you left behind in grade school. Oh, if only that were true. But social dynamics from childhood often resurface. What makes them different from personality conflicts is that they are more complex. Not only does personality take a hand, but so do class, economics, status, and perception, among other things.
When you have cliques that have formed within the team — and that can easily happen if you are joining an existing one — you can't swap people out. At that point, you're potentially dealing with too many team members. Focus on creating circumstances under which people are forced to work with a mix of other team members. You can't keep people from socializing outside of the team's activities, but you can ensure a more inclusive mix when it comes to pursuing team goals.
Operational Processes
Why bring up processes in a discussion about people? Force people into bad processes, and you generally create bad moods. Aggregate those sour dispositions, and pretty soon you've turned the atmosphere in the entire building.
Improving conditions to heighten a team's dynamics and, as a result, operations, is a grand idea. But there is a natural limit. You can't always make life pleasant for everyone. After all, a sewer worker must go into the muck, even if you perfume it.
Luckily, this is one of the most easily controlled factors affecting team dynamics. There are many times you can improve conditions. Talk to the team members about their greatest frustrations and have them rank the problems. Find some that are in the top three positions on most of the lists. Work on the ones you can, and see how the atmosphere changes for the better.
Organizational Culture
Every organization has its own culture — like a personality. This personality interacts with each team member's personality. It's as though you had an extra person always hanging around. As with any combination of personalities, sometimes the mix works, and other times it doesn't. When it doesn't — or when the culture has an adverse effect on how two different team members interact — the results can be disastrous.
Unfortunately, changing a culture is incredibly difficult at best and impossible at worst. If you aren't head of the organization, the chances of changing the culture are virtually nonexistent; it takes that sort of authority to even attempt to modify it. In other words, getting people and processes to change is the only way to make a difference. You can always alter processes. It is a shame, but often when there's a clash between a team member and culture, the only answer is to find a replacement.
