What comes first? The goal or the team?
The goal, right? Otherwise, why bother getting a group of people to work together?
Let's define a team as a group of people with shared goals and methods to achieve them.
I think most teams are indeed formed to accomplish a prescribed set of goals. I also think it's possible for a team to accidentally disband without knowing it. This happens when the inital set of goals changes, perhaps unknowingly. Logistically they are still a team. They may still all report to the same manager, etc. But in terms of the actual work, they really aren't.
Perhaps part of the problem is that teams are often formed around products. The end goal is to create and manage some product, right? But the product is really just a means to an end, not the end. The end is the shared goals. If the goals change the product become useless, or even worse, a barrier to actually accomplishing the goals.
Related thoughts
- When a work group establishes shared goals and methods to achieve these goals, it transforms into a team.
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