Groups

A collection of people who come together to achieve some purpose.

Groups, like the people that comprise them, come in different shapes and sizes. A group is a collection of individual people who come together to achieve some purpose. A group is a lesser thing than a team, which performs at a higher level of cohesion than a mere group needs to (see Teams).

Generally speaking, the more a group exceeds seven people in number the more cumbersome it becomes. This is because each individual brings a different mix of strengths and weaknesses, experiences and perceptions. On the one hand this provides an excellent opportunity for the group to tap into a wide diversity of views. On the other hand it makes it difficult to reach genuine agreement on anything at all. Sometimes agreement is apparent rather than real because of the tendency to fall in with majority opinion. This results in faint-hearted acquiescing.

Because of the difficulties of getting it all together, the chair or co-ordinator has a key part to play (see Chairing meetings). Unfortunately, most groups cannot boast a chair or co-ordinator who is up to the job. The most frequent reason for this is that the chair gets too involved in the task and doesn’t do enough to manage the process.

To comprehend fully the distinction between task and process it is necessary to appreciate the evolutionary stages that groups go through.

Stage 1
The chaotic stage

Groups of people who are thrown together and given a task to tackle tend to underestimate the complexities of getting a group to cohere. This is especially true if the group starts from scratch with no designated roles or previous experience of working together.

A group in the chaotic stage tries to overcome uncertainty and ambiguity by flinging itself headlong into the task in hand without giving enough, if any, attention to the process. The noticeable characteristics of a group in the chaotic stage are that:

• no time is given to setting clear objectives that everyone subscribes to. The group assumes that everyone knows what the objectives are.
• inadequate time is given to planning how to tackle the task.
• if a leader is appointed, no thought is given to clarifying the leader’s role; it is likely that the appointed leader will try to impose his or her authority on a group, which will not consent.
• ideas will be voiced but not listened to and developed; or rejected because the level of interrupting and overspeaking will be inefficiently high.
• the success of the group will be patchy; sometimes, despite the chaos, it will get by; sometimes it will fail. Whatever the outcome, the tendency to rationalise, ie for people to claim that they did achieve what they set out to, is high.

Stage 2
The formal stage

Eventually a group will react against the chaotic stage by tightening up and becoming more formal. It is very likely to overreact, however, and introduce formal procedures that swing the pendulum too far the other way. The most noticeable characteristics of a group in the formal stage are these:

• There will be rigid, step-by-step procedures for agreeing objectives and plans. Typically, a group might have a system of going round the table, letting everyone have their say. It might also instigate a system of writing up the objective in large letters for all to see.
• The need for strong leadership is frequently emphasised. In a formal group this means ensuring that people stick to the procedures, don’t argue, don’t interrupt one another and so on. Strong leadership is seen as the solution to the problems of the chaotic stage. If the group fails, the leader is criticised for not being strong enough!
• Different people in the group will be given specific roles such as time-keeper or secretary; and there will be explicit rules of behaviour such as only speaking through the chair, considering one idea at a time, recapping frequently from the secretary’s minutes, and so on.
• The success of the group will improve if the time limits are sufficiently elastic to allow extra time for all the formalities.

Stage 3
The skilful stage

Gradually, a group outlives the formal stage and begins to ‘take liberties’ with its own procedures without slipping back into chaos. Sometimes a group rebels against the rigidity of the formal stage too early and oscillates between the chaotic and formal stages. Sometimes a group gets stuck in the formal stage, convinced that formality and rules are the only antidote to chaos.

The breakthrough to the skilful stage usually occurs when the group realises that some part of its formal procedures is inappropriate to the particular task in hand. It therefore cuts some corners and, in so doing, discovers that it can cope.

The most noticeable characteristics of a group in the skilful stage, ie a team, are:

• all procedures for objective-setting, planning, time-keeping or whatever are agreed in the light of the task to be done and the situation. The procedures are therefore flexible rather than rigid.
• the leader is less directive and more participative. Indeed, in a skilful team that has ‘got it together’, the role of the leader is relatively redundant. A leader may just be needed occasionally as a ‘long stop’. A formal-stage group is leader-dependent, whereas a skilful-stage is leader-independent.
• team members, in whatever role, share equal responsibility for the success of the team.
• the atmosphere in the team is trusting and co-operative.
• the team is more successful in achieving challenging objectives.

One of the interesting discoveries about this evolutionary process is that a team operating at the skilful stage gets there via the formal stage. Just as only a caterpillar can become a butterfly, the formal stage seems a necessary developmental step to the skilful stage. The skills acquired for rigid planning are different in degree but not in kind from the skills required for flexible planning.

So the formal stage is an essential step in the learning process. It is the equivalent of learning to walk before you can run.

The secret of success is, therefore, to get a group into the formal stage as fast as possible. Once there, performance needs to be maintained by regular reviews. If the group:

• has sufficiently challenging tasks to tackle
• has a reasonably constant core of members
• is due to meet frequently (say, at least weekly)

then it may be appropriate for it to progress to operating at the skilful stage. (For more on this, see Teams.)