Building the Team: Tasks, People, and Relationships

The first rule of teamwork at SEI, the money management firm headquartered in Oaks, Pennsylvania, is that there are remarkably few rules. Teams have anywhere from 2 to 30 members and every team is structured differently. Most employees belong to one “base team” as well as three or four ad hoc teams. These ad hoc teams give SEI a sense of perpetual motion. Work is distributed among roughly 140 self-managing teams. Some are permanent, designed to serve big customers or important markets. But many are temporary: People come together to solve a problem and disband when their work is done. The result is a workplace that is always on the move. “We call it fluid leadership,” says SEI's Chairman and CEO Al West. “People figure out what they're good at, and that shapes what their roles are. There's not just one leader.

We have focused on some of the important dimensions of creating and managing teams in a direct fashion. Much planning needs to precede the construction of teams and, once constructed, teams need fairly continuous maintenance. To the extent that the teams are manager-led, this work is the purview of the leader or manager; the more self-directing the team becomes, the more the team will do this for itself. When the team is built—in terms of the task, the people, and their relationships—the leader's work does not stop. During this time, the leader needs to also assess the physical, material, economic, and staffing resources necessary for performing the work to be done. The focus of the leader should not be to presume that everything is fine, but rather to coach the team to work through the issues of task, people, and relationships systematically.