Teams depend on core concepts to collaborate, game plan, and work together.
These concepts create the shared understanding that teams need to get things done. Concepts like “strategy,” “talent,” “transparency,” “potential,” “accountability,” “team,” “teamwork,” and “urgency” get tossed around from person to person with the idea that everyone agrees as to what they mean.
That is rarely the case.
When communicating, people presume they have similar definitions, descriptions, and examples of these core concepts in their heads. In reality and without knowing it, people have competing understandings that influence how they work and achieve together.
Until they are tightly defined, concepts are more abstract and allow people the leeway to bring their own meanings to the task of understanding them.
Because most core concepts carry positive social value and are used frequently, no one challenges the multiple definitions that are in play. Assuming that everyone knows and agrees to what “trust” or “risk” means helps to create recurring conflicts, slow decisions, and misalignment.
When team members define core concepts differently, the consequences are often subtle at first. The problems emerge later when actions diverge.
People make decisions and draw conclusions consistent with how they see core concepts. What appears to be disagreement about solutions is often a disagreement about definitions.
For instance, a debate about the risk of a new strategy may involve one team member focused on probability, another focused on severity, and yet another concerned with reputation. The discussion soon becomes circular because each person is answering a different question, shaped by their own definition.
When people know they disagree, they can typically resolve the issues between them. But when they believe they agree because they use the same words, they create plans together on top of misunderstandings. The resulting failures of the plan seem mysterious because the root issues were hidden in the language itself.
Good leaders and teams identify the core concepts they depend on to make progress and perform. They collaborate to give each concept a precise definition, replete with descriptions and examples.
In essence, they create a glossary for the concepts they use and publish it so everyone is on the same page when they are discussed. They make sure to give this glossary to new team members who enter the conversation with their own definitions in their heads.
Because these definitions shape hundreds of actions and decisions downstream, defining core concepts more precisely is a best practice that pays big dividends. Good leaders refuse to let team members unknowingly attach different meanings to the same important words and concepts.
Teams don’t fail nearly as much from a lack of alignment. They fail from the illusion of alignment. A team glossary helps to prevent this. By the way, what exactly does your team mean by “ownership?”
