We know teaming and how it can benefit your organization however there are many examples of team pitfalls. 

Avoiding Team Pitfalls
Quality Circles, in the 1970's, was the first big push to mimic Japan's success with a team based work culture. Although there were success stories, and some organizations still use them, most saw them as a failure. Some of the reasons for failure included:
1.	Inadequate measurements of results.
2.	Management understanding of process.
3.	Team members not right for the problem.
4.	Management dominated the process.
5.	Lack of training with problem solving tools.
6.	First problem too tough - caused frustration.
More modern team processes did learn from many of the mistakes of Quality Circles. Still there is much improvement that can be made:
	Measurement of the overall team process is weak, if nonexistent, in many organizations. This can lead management to be misinformed about the effectiveness of "teams" and since a large amount of company time is spent by teams, it is significant.
	Most organizations have limited resources to insure teams are operating effectively.
	Not everyone can be involved on a team. Those people often feel "left out". The ability of everyone to be able to participate on a team or in another quality process is important.

We can send you a copy of "A Team Process That Meets Expectations". An informative article that covers these topics in more detail. To review the health of your team process, we can also provide with our "Checklist for Success". It itemizes key ingredients of a successful team process.