When I sat in my Software Engineering or management courses it always seemed like an interesting task to rally the troops and build a working software solution. In these courses we learned to identify talent and involve people with whatever skills they had in their arsenal. Successful and failed projects passed by; each one taught a lesson about coping with failure and harnessing success towards future efforts. Everything was a process to accomplish a common goal: teams were given a task, chose an approach and learned how to squeeze all the talent they could into a solid attempt at the solution. All of these trials seemed to be finely tuning muscles to be called on in any team situation and bring out the best solutions. Entering the workforce has quickly shown where I’ve developed strong muscles in some wrong areas, and I find myself aggressively pursuing a figure skating gold with legs trained for speed-skating.

The problem that I face most frequently isn’t the sharp corners or the break-neck speeds, it’s to get the body started in the same direction. A primary team, the integrators on-site to install the system, is firmly situated with a solid mission, for the most part, with both eyes on the finish-line. It’s a little looser than I was used to having, but you can ease into an established group and take cues from managers and clear decision-makers. Once you pick up the tone and the focus of the group then you can start a few strokes along with the group. Before you know it, you’re keeping up with the pack and generating some quality work. The finish line might keep moving 100m farther out, but you’re keeping pace and making progress.

In a larger organization, like mine, you often have secondary groups; fast-response teams are formed on directives from management of people with diverse skills or similar functional areas to work across normal organization. Predefined goals for these groups are often vague, but in the worst case you can still look to the 1-line e-mail that started the whole project. The absolute worst case are groups that self-organize to improve quality of life or “enhance productivity”, focusing on all kinds of issues without a clear directive. These groups, like PTAs, community development boards, and other groups are lucky to get their skates on the ice, much less run a race.

This kind of group is the one I am least prepared to deal with. I’ve often been a member of groups that start informally with a great solution in mind, but this idea of just having problems to solve is mind-blowing! (Un)Fortunately I’ve got a chance to work on this as I’m getting involved in just such a group. In this group you have some of the worst combinations: lack of financial or capital resources, long history of peaks and troughs in efficiency, little recognition, lack of power, volunteered or borrowed time from other recognized efforts, poor documentation/recollection of events and milestones, opinionated members, and cynicism/resentment from participating members. From this description it sounds like the only thing they’re missing is a coffin, but luckily that’s not the case. This group, like many groups that suffer similar handicaps, has a lot of talent and passion buried in each of it’s members. The key is to bring it out.

In cases like this there is a lot of push and pull at every single step. People will take a piece of the puzzle in which they’re interested and start skating as hard as they can in whatever direction seems best. Then another comes and does the same, and another, and another. All of these people think they are doing their best to contribute, but in reality they’re just creating confusion. Even if a solution comes out you have no metric for success, and no way to get motivated by progress being made. You’ve just got a rink full of crazy people.

As a team leader, you must see how important it is to seek purpose for yourself and for your group. Defining a clear purpose gives your team focus and drive. They’ll begin to give pause to even the smallest of their actions, and they’ll begin to seek out solutions and ideas that will get more impact on the objective.

Of course, this is all very different from group to group. Sometimes, you’ll find that defining a purpose and setting boundaries for your group is very simple, and other times it will be very hard. I made a comment, half-jokingly, to a colleague: “It would almost be easier if we were fighting against racism, because at least then maybe we’d know who we were.” Forgive me if I come off as insensitive, but I feel this is a very important, albeit blunt, point. When you’re fighting on battle lines with increasingly intangible opponents and problems it drastically magnifies the need for clear, concise and defined purpose. You don’t have battle flags or holy relics to look for in cube-land.

To continue, in this modern world you’ll be hard pressed to find a team that will walk to the Holy Land and back without a good reason they should go beat up some other guy who lives closer. And why not?! Life is too short to waste time on lost causes or crusades you don’t believe in. If someone calls my house and says “Please donate money, I want to do some stuff for people” I’ll hang up the phone. No one will take you seriously or help you in any significant way if you can’t give them a reason to support you with their resources.