Committees Lead To Half Finished Work

I have yet to be on an effective committee.

If it were effective, you would have called it a team. ;->

Committees are a fact of life, and do not have to be 'teams' to be effective.

What's your favorite baseball committee?

The difference between a team and a committee is decision-making powers. Groups with no decision-making powers whatsoever are unambiguously teams. Meanwhile, those with the power to decide their own structure and their own goals are unambiguously committees. Then there are groups with the limited power to decide how best to accomplish given goals.

Some obvious results follow:

All corporations are committees
All societies are committees
Nothing uniquely human is involved in being part of a team
Reducing an individual to their role in a team is dehumanizing

Just to put a monkeywrench into the dubious idea that "committee bad, team good".

If committees lead to half finished work, that may merely be because they get distracted and have the power to divert themselves from their nominal goals.

What language are you speaking?

In the building industry those working to procure and construct a new building are 'a Team' while things are going well. When the problems start 'Team-ness' can soon evaporate in the defensive back-covering that often ensues. -- MartinNoutch

Too true. For example: a man with the job title "Technical Architect" resigned recently. On the card glued to the front of his day-book that title has been crossed out and the words "fall guy" written in. No team-ness had been seen in the environment he left for a long, long time.

I work in a company where everything is done by committee. I think the formation of these committees placates the stakeholders that something will be done about the issue at hand. But the committee rarely meets and everything just sits on the back burner. They also are now saying that teams are temporary and committees are permanent - that is the differentiator.

One of my favorite quotes of all time: "A committee is a cul-de-sac into which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled." There are real, solid organizational reasons why committees are so often less-than-functional. The committee as a whole receives some grand charter to manage some type of change, whether it is the adoption of new technologies, the design of new processes, or the definition of new standards. But each committee member is charged (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) to ensure that whatever the change is has a negligible impact on the group they represent. The conflict between the mission of the group and the mission of the members frequently leads to deadlock. -- BillBarnett

What do BlueRibbonCommittees? lead to?