A Group or a Team: What’s the Difference?

A Group and a Team

Sometimes people assume that if they get together as a group of people that they will automatically become a team. Though this isn’t the case, it does take an act of reflection to actually step back and explore the difference between a group and a team. When we do so, we identify some of the differences between these two collective states, making it easier to move from one to the other.

Incidentally, many of the models of team development are premised on bridging many of these distinctions between simply being a group and being a team. Some of these models are referenced in the “learning more” section of this post.

A Group

A group is just a collection of people who happen to be together. They typically lack shared purpose and understanding, at least at the very start of their time together.

Groups typically also lack shared language, lack a leader, lack agreed ways of working, lack rituals and shared practices, they may lack a shared history as well. They often have individual goals, lack roles and responsibilities and aren’t great at communicating.

In many ways, they’re a bit of a social blank slate, though they do exist in, and are influenced by, the wider context in which they are formed.

A Team

Teams are a group of people that have come together and coalesced around the mutual sharing of many things, typically all the things described about which groups are lacking.

In this list of things a team has we will find things like a clear leader (often, though not always), shared and agreed ways of working, clear roles and responsibilities, specialism within roles, effective communication and language, rituals of communication, common language and understood terms, mutual accountability (think joint and several), shared goals, shared purpose, shared values, and so on.

How do we use this?

We use the distinction between a team and a group in some workshops as a starting point for exploring team development. When we do this, we’ll typically as a group of participants to discuss in breakout groups what they think the difference is between a team and a group. Depending on who they are, we might ask them to draw what they consider the differences to be.

From there we simply open up the conversation and ask participants to share what they’ve discussed. Building on this, we then ask what they think the role of a leader is in helping a collection of people from being a group to being a team, and what actions they think could help them do so.

Obviously, it’s important to explore followership and being a good team member as well, so we also ask what non-leaders in the group could do to support and accelerate the journey as well.

There is a lot of content and theory on topics like this. It’s probably worth starting with some classic models like Tuckman’s team formation model and Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions. COG’s Ladder is also helpful. These models are, in many ways, just slightly different ways to explore the same underlying points.

It’s also worth looking at a few things to do with interpersonal dynamics, like Trust and the SCARF Model too.

You might also enjoy this podcast on Culture:

There isn’t too much to say about this that isn’t covered above.

Obviously, it’s just a simple little framing, conversation starter and facilitation tool. It works better for some participant groups than others, but it’s nice to have in the facilitation toolkit. It’s also the type of things that can be helpful in team meetings and so on as it’s an easily facilitated activity that teams can run themselves.

No real sources here, just working with clients. If you think there should be sources, please let us know and we’ll update.

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