Dear Bob ... What does "working on team coherence" mean? Probably it means wasting everyone's time on meaningless meetings, expecting the competent staff to cover for the boss's lover, or showing up at the Saturday team picnic. If I had an excellent employee who preferred to work alone or one-on-one and didn't cause any problems except when I made him come to meetings, I would stop making him come to meetings. I Dear Bob …What does “working on team coherence” mean? Probably it means wasting everyone’s time on meaningless meetings, expecting the competent staff to cover for the boss’s lover, or showing up at the Saturday team picnic.If I had an excellent employee who preferred to work alone or one-on-one and didn’t cause any problems except when I made him come to meetings, I would stop making him come to meetings. If this caused a morale problem with my other employees I would ask what was wrong with the meetings, not the employees. – SkepticalDear Skeptical …So team coherence “probably” means covering for the boss’s lover, wasting time on meaningless meetings and otherwise abusing productive staff on stupid management boondoggles? I’m sure these things happen. Heck, I know these things happen. But probably?Team coherence – the alignment of each employee to a common purpose, and the establishment of trust among the individuals who make up the team – is among the more important challenges IT leaders face. By some definitions, this alignment is the difference between a team and a committee.Part of what makes it challenging is that some employees find the effort to be meaningless, since it doesn’t involve writing code, changing user privileges, or monitoring database server memory utilization. These employees are dead wrong – they’re the ones who complain later that they did their jobs according to spec, and if the result was wrong, it isn’t their fault – the specs were wrong – never stopping to think that if they’d picked up the telephone or got out of their chair to confer with another employee who lives two cubicles away, the problem would never have happened. To get work done, managers must break down large-scale goals into individual responsibilities while making sure every team member is knowledgeable about the larger context into which their efforts must fit. That’s alignment. If the team members don’t have confidence in each other, they’ll waste time doing work twice, incompatibly. That’s the trust part.Establishing trust and a common purpose can’t happen without those meetings you assume are meaningless. So my advice is this: Give your manager a break, and the benefit of the doubt.Chances are good he or she is trying to make sure your hard work is pointed in the right direction. – Bob ——– Technology Industry