‘A set of persons working together’. That’s a bald definition of ‘team’ from the dictionary, and it tells you all too little about the term in a business management context. You don’t know how big or small the ‘set’ has to be before it ceases to be a team. More important, you don’t know what ‘together’ means. Working in the same department on separate matters isn’t teamwork: that over-used word implies exchange of information, views, ideas, contributions, etc. That exchange should result in synergy, that magical process by which two and two makes five (if not more).
If true teamwork is achieved, the magic is real enough. The joy of working together is supposed to cement the collective power of a group of people - a power which, so psychologists aver, is greater than that of a single brain, however brilliant. The gains from that power, moreover, are by no means small. The American Society of Training and Development learned from 230 personnel executives that they had seen the following team-driven gains in performance in their companies: productivity, up 78%; production quality, 72% higher; job satisfaction, 65% up; time wastage, down 54%.
To cap all these solid internal achievements, the key index of external performance - customer satisfaction - had improved by over half. However sceptical you are about such surveys, and however amply justified that scepticism may be in general, few managers will want to challenge these findings. After all, they endorse the received wisdom. The more closely any set of persons works together, surely, the better that work must be. Irrespective of the results, moreover, ‘team’ has good, powerful, emotional correlations.
ORGANISATIONAL DEMERIT
No manager would boast of being a bad teamworker; that’s a demerit in any organisation. A good team, on the other hand, virtually defines good management. It is well-led towards precise objectives, decision and action alike are effective, communication is top-class, and every member works towards meeting those clear targets - for the group and for themselves. Nor would any manager deny that forming and nurturing teams of itself contributes to this high-level management.
All that being so, why is good teamwork so difficult to achieve? One answer is that sometime demon, human nature. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, two authors, Vijay Govindajarajan and Chris Trimble, study the case of CoreCo and NewCo - an established business and a start-up launched by top management in the pursuit of new growth. Everybody in both divisions shares an important interest in NewCo’s success. Yet the latter encounters obstruction rather than genuine cooperation from CoreCo’s people, who perceive that NewCo will.....
• cannibalise their revenues
• damage existing CoreCo products
• damage CoreCo business relationships
• damage bonus payments by its losses
• compete for scarce resources
In a word, then, it’s a matter of trust. CoreCo’s managers are deeply suspicious of anything the newcomer’s leaders may do; the presumed danger to the veterans’ established interests far outweighs the benefits, in their minds, that a new and vital business would confer on the group. As the authors remark, establishing trust between two very different outfits is the problem, compounded by jealousy:
‘CoreCo managers are jealous of NewCo… They have worked for years or decades to advance within CoreCo, and now CoreCo may appear inferior to a much younger…sexier division’.
The analogy with teams is obvious. In theory, the existing members should welcome new talent with open arms. The better the new recruit performs, the better the team will do - and, again in theory, team success is everyone’s primary concern. In practice, however, that demonic human nature will rear its ugly head.
Just like the CoreCo veterans, established team managers will feel threatened. In a bizarre twist, the new person’s failure may be more welcome to the envious colleagues than his and the team’s success.
DISRUPTIVE RIVALRY
This is by no means theoretical. The HBR authors cite the troubles which beset New York Times when it was tempted, like most media owners, by the promise of the Internet. ‘Tensions rooted in rivalry’ proved disruptive and interactions took on an ‘us versus them’ undertone. The net people aimed to be ‘fast moving, anti-bureaucratic, risk-taking and experimental’. The Times newspaper staff resented the implication here that they were sluggish, bureaucratic, risk-averse and tied to ‘the way we do things round here’.
Which they probably were. Companies are most commonly formed on divisive lines which entrench the status quo. Bureaucracies serve hierarchies of power. Where the matrix rules, product, geography and function have hardened into strong and separate baronies. The company may be decentralised into ‘strategic management units’: under that or any other name, these profit centres are walled off from what should be corporate partners.
Very few businesses are truly entrepreneurial, with flat structures and a pro-risk culture, and even fewer are truly people-based, giving the employees ownership of their jobs and full responsibility for execution. Yet this is the wave of the future, and the reason why the role of teams in management is clearly and strongly rising in importance. The significance of the NewCos is waxing while that of the CoreCo is waning. And NewCos are the natural ground for team working, which expresses the positive aspects of human nature in groups.
Benign human nature, economic trends, key management principles and technological change all point in the direction of more and better teams. Man is a gregarious animal to whom group loyalties are very powerful - witness the devotion in all social and economic classes to football clubs with which the fan may have no link other than his loyalty and whose teams are largely composed of multinational mercenaries who have no loyalties themselves.
LOYALTY DRIVE
Harness the loyalty drive of its members to any company team, and you maximise the benefit from their collective power. You need that power to exploit the new opportunities which must be taken at a time when core activities are being commoditised, outsourced, pooled, etc.
Even if they remain cash cows, the milk is less rich; and bovine businesses are no match for rising stars. The latter’s rise, however, will be slowed and even frustrated unless entrusted to truly independent teams.
The difficulties reported in the HBR article explored above frequently hinge on misplaced efforts to restrain the NewCo’s freedom of decision and action. At Corning a new venture in micro arrays for handling DNA samples had a rough passage for two years: ‘All of CMT’s troubles’, the authors comment, ‘were probably inevitable from the moment CMT adopted Corning’s organisational design.’ At New York Times, success on the net only followed when ‘company leaders carefully monitored interactions with the newspaper’ - basically to stop the latter from strangling the infant in its crib.
It makes no difference whether a team is building a lasting new entity (as in the above cases); tackling a major issue that is intended to cease (like putting two companies together after a merger); combining back offices of separate businesses in an outsourcing move; or running a drive to improve production quality.
In any operation, the likely best approach is to build units around a discrete activity and then divide the overall project into the most efficiently manageable sub-units, teams in their own rights and themselves managed on the same principles of delegation and autonomy. Stand-alone project management is the prime example of teamwork, and has of necessity spread fast throughout the corporate world. While there are many other possible areas of teamwork, from the boardroom to the finance department, the more they share the stand-alone virtues the better.
The starting point naturally comes first - a purpose. Why has the team been created? In the justly famous case of IBM’s Personal Computer, the object was not just to develop a rival to Apple in this new computing market, but to do so at unprecedented speed, while offering significant improvements in the technology.
The fact that it was a crash programme proved to be a major asset. That always gives the project a driving urgency and enables a team to sweep potential constraints out of its way - here, independence even embraced freedom to break IBM’s insistence on making and buying all components in-house.
PHENOMENAL WORK
The world-changing rise of personal computing, however, drew heavily on the phenomenal work of an even greater team, the Palo Alto Research Center established by Xerox. Although its aims were grand and relevant - to combine the many Xerox technologies for a great leap forward into a new age - PARC lacked the focus of IBM. Nobody knew exactly what the lab was supposed to achieve. When the prototype PC emerged from the combined brilliance of the team, nobody knew what to do with the wonder. It didn’t fit mentalities developed to make and sell copiers.
Team purpose should be very precise and germane to the business: and the bigger the objective the better. Think small, and you’re liable to end small. Think big, and you may well be most agreeably surprised: self-fulfilling prophecies are the best forecasts of all. To its own amazement, IBM was swamped by the totally unexpected flood of orders for the new PC. In many other companies and cases teams given unreasonable aims have greatly exceeded the expectations of their sponsors. Thus NCR’s engineers in Dundee, asked to double the reliability of ATMs, trebled it and set the company on the way to world leadership.
One vital asset of team purpose is that it can be shared. It’s the keystone of participation, which in turn breeds total commitment, both to the overall plan and to the agreed sub-plans needed for the whole. It tells all the team members where they are going and why – from the bottom to the leadership at the top. The leader, of course, is the chief custodian of the purpose and is responsible for seeing that the team members, and the team as a whole, achieve the desired performance. Do not forget: teams exist to produce superior outcomes.
In obtaining their good results team leaders turn into conductor rather than driver, enabling others to play the right music, not by hands-on domination of all decisions and execution, but by providing inspiration, invigilation and stimulus. Dominance obviously fits ill with what should be the collective ethos of the team. Its leader is, or should be, primus inter pares, a first among equals; not the typical CEO, who is primus - and never mind about the equality.
Another article in the HBR identifies seven types of leadership, only one of which mentions teams. That’s the Achiever, who ‘meets strategic goals’: he/she ‘effectively achieves goals through teams’. You would suppose this character to be the hero of authors David Rooke and William R. Torbett. Not so - even though, when it comes to implementing the strategies, the Achiever significantly outdoes the Opportunist (‘wins any way possible’), the Diplomat (‘avoids overt conflict’) and the Expert (‘rules by logic and expertise’).
But the Achiever in turn is beaten to the performance punch by three others: the Alchemist (‘generates social transformations’), the Strategist (this type ‘generates organisational and personal transformations’), and the Individualist (‘interweaves competing personal and company action logics’).
OBVIOUS PARADOX
The paradox in this classification is obvious. How can any of the other six types perform well without the Achiever’s ability to effectively achieve goals through teams? For that matter, how can the Achiever succeed without deploying the powers of the Diplomat, etc? And why does the Achiever account for 30% of the research sample, three times as many as those described as Alchemists and Strategists, if the latter are ‘most effective for organisational leadership’?
The questions recall Meredith Belbin’s first, famous account of the seven roles needed for team success: coordinator, ideas person, critic, implementer, external contact, inspector, team-builder. Somebody has to fill each role, and the team leader (a role not identified with any of the seven) has a part to play under each heading. The same truth applies to the Rooke-Torbert types. The Achiever-leader plays many parts, but only in part. The rest is delegation. That’s what gives teams their special strength and their pole position in today’s races for success. That demon, human nature, has many facets, good and bad. The well-led team of well-chosen, well-deployed people negates the bad and accentuates the good - and everybody wins.
If true teamwork is achieved, the magic is real enough. The joy of working together is supposed to cement the collective power of a group of people - a power which, so psychologists aver, is greater than that of a single brain, however brilliant. The gains from that power, moreover, are by no means small. The American Society of Training and Development learned from 230 personnel executives that they had seen the following team-driven gains in performance in their companies: productivity, up 78%; production quality, 72% higher; job satisfaction, 65% up; time wastage, down 54%.
To cap all these solid internal achievements, the key index of external performance - customer satisfaction - had improved by over half. However sceptical you are about such surveys, and however amply justified that scepticism may be in general, few managers will want to challenge these findings. After all, they endorse the received wisdom. The more closely any set of persons works together, surely, the better that work must be. Irrespective of the results, moreover, ‘team’ has good, powerful, emotional correlations.
ORGANISATIONAL DEMERIT
No manager would boast of being a bad teamworker; that’s a demerit in any organisation. A good team, on the other hand, virtually defines good management. It is well-led towards precise objectives, decision and action alike are effective, communication is top-class, and every member works towards meeting those clear targets - for the group and for themselves. Nor would any manager deny that forming and nurturing teams of itself contributes to this high-level management.
All that being so, why is good teamwork so difficult to achieve? One answer is that sometime demon, human nature. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, two authors, Vijay Govindajarajan and Chris Trimble, study the case of CoreCo and NewCo - an established business and a start-up launched by top management in the pursuit of new growth. Everybody in both divisions shares an important interest in NewCo’s success. Yet the latter encounters obstruction rather than genuine cooperation from CoreCo’s people, who perceive that NewCo will.....
• cannibalise their revenues
• damage existing CoreCo products
• damage CoreCo business relationships
• damage bonus payments by its losses
• compete for scarce resources
In a word, then, it’s a matter of trust. CoreCo’s managers are deeply suspicious of anything the newcomer’s leaders may do; the presumed danger to the veterans’ established interests far outweighs the benefits, in their minds, that a new and vital business would confer on the group. As the authors remark, establishing trust between two very different outfits is the problem, compounded by jealousy:
‘CoreCo managers are jealous of NewCo… They have worked for years or decades to advance within CoreCo, and now CoreCo may appear inferior to a much younger…sexier division’.
The analogy with teams is obvious. In theory, the existing members should welcome new talent with open arms. The better the new recruit performs, the better the team will do - and, again in theory, team success is everyone’s primary concern. In practice, however, that demonic human nature will rear its ugly head.
Just like the CoreCo veterans, established team managers will feel threatened. In a bizarre twist, the new person’s failure may be more welcome to the envious colleagues than his and the team’s success.
DISRUPTIVE RIVALRY
This is by no means theoretical. The HBR authors cite the troubles which beset New York Times when it was tempted, like most media owners, by the promise of the Internet. ‘Tensions rooted in rivalry’ proved disruptive and interactions took on an ‘us versus them’ undertone. The net people aimed to be ‘fast moving, anti-bureaucratic, risk-taking and experimental’. The Times newspaper staff resented the implication here that they were sluggish, bureaucratic, risk-averse and tied to ‘the way we do things round here’.
Which they probably were. Companies are most commonly formed on divisive lines which entrench the status quo. Bureaucracies serve hierarchies of power. Where the matrix rules, product, geography and function have hardened into strong and separate baronies. The company may be decentralised into ‘strategic management units’: under that or any other name, these profit centres are walled off from what should be corporate partners.
Very few businesses are truly entrepreneurial, with flat structures and a pro-risk culture, and even fewer are truly people-based, giving the employees ownership of their jobs and full responsibility for execution. Yet this is the wave of the future, and the reason why the role of teams in management is clearly and strongly rising in importance. The significance of the NewCos is waxing while that of the CoreCo is waning. And NewCos are the natural ground for team working, which expresses the positive aspects of human nature in groups.
Benign human nature, economic trends, key management principles and technological change all point in the direction of more and better teams. Man is a gregarious animal to whom group loyalties are very powerful - witness the devotion in all social and economic classes to football clubs with which the fan may have no link other than his loyalty and whose teams are largely composed of multinational mercenaries who have no loyalties themselves.
LOYALTY DRIVE
Harness the loyalty drive of its members to any company team, and you maximise the benefit from their collective power. You need that power to exploit the new opportunities which must be taken at a time when core activities are being commoditised, outsourced, pooled, etc.
Even if they remain cash cows, the milk is less rich; and bovine businesses are no match for rising stars. The latter’s rise, however, will be slowed and even frustrated unless entrusted to truly independent teams.
The difficulties reported in the HBR article explored above frequently hinge on misplaced efforts to restrain the NewCo’s freedom of decision and action. At Corning a new venture in micro arrays for handling DNA samples had a rough passage for two years: ‘All of CMT’s troubles’, the authors comment, ‘were probably inevitable from the moment CMT adopted Corning’s organisational design.’ At New York Times, success on the net only followed when ‘company leaders carefully monitored interactions with the newspaper’ - basically to stop the latter from strangling the infant in its crib.
It makes no difference whether a team is building a lasting new entity (as in the above cases); tackling a major issue that is intended to cease (like putting two companies together after a merger); combining back offices of separate businesses in an outsourcing move; or running a drive to improve production quality.
In any operation, the likely best approach is to build units around a discrete activity and then divide the overall project into the most efficiently manageable sub-units, teams in their own rights and themselves managed on the same principles of delegation and autonomy. Stand-alone project management is the prime example of teamwork, and has of necessity spread fast throughout the corporate world. While there are many other possible areas of teamwork, from the boardroom to the finance department, the more they share the stand-alone virtues the better.
The starting point naturally comes first - a purpose. Why has the team been created? In the justly famous case of IBM’s Personal Computer, the object was not just to develop a rival to Apple in this new computing market, but to do so at unprecedented speed, while offering significant improvements in the technology.
The fact that it was a crash programme proved to be a major asset. That always gives the project a driving urgency and enables a team to sweep potential constraints out of its way - here, independence even embraced freedom to break IBM’s insistence on making and buying all components in-house.
PHENOMENAL WORK
The world-changing rise of personal computing, however, drew heavily on the phenomenal work of an even greater team, the Palo Alto Research Center established by Xerox. Although its aims were grand and relevant - to combine the many Xerox technologies for a great leap forward into a new age - PARC lacked the focus of IBM. Nobody knew exactly what the lab was supposed to achieve. When the prototype PC emerged from the combined brilliance of the team, nobody knew what to do with the wonder. It didn’t fit mentalities developed to make and sell copiers.
Team purpose should be very precise and germane to the business: and the bigger the objective the better. Think small, and you’re liable to end small. Think big, and you may well be most agreeably surprised: self-fulfilling prophecies are the best forecasts of all. To its own amazement, IBM was swamped by the totally unexpected flood of orders for the new PC. In many other companies and cases teams given unreasonable aims have greatly exceeded the expectations of their sponsors. Thus NCR’s engineers in Dundee, asked to double the reliability of ATMs, trebled it and set the company on the way to world leadership.
One vital asset of team purpose is that it can be shared. It’s the keystone of participation, which in turn breeds total commitment, both to the overall plan and to the agreed sub-plans needed for the whole. It tells all the team members where they are going and why – from the bottom to the leadership at the top. The leader, of course, is the chief custodian of the purpose and is responsible for seeing that the team members, and the team as a whole, achieve the desired performance. Do not forget: teams exist to produce superior outcomes.
In obtaining their good results team leaders turn into conductor rather than driver, enabling others to play the right music, not by hands-on domination of all decisions and execution, but by providing inspiration, invigilation and stimulus. Dominance obviously fits ill with what should be the collective ethos of the team. Its leader is, or should be, primus inter pares, a first among equals; not the typical CEO, who is primus - and never mind about the equality.
Another article in the HBR identifies seven types of leadership, only one of which mentions teams. That’s the Achiever, who ‘meets strategic goals’: he/she ‘effectively achieves goals through teams’. You would suppose this character to be the hero of authors David Rooke and William R. Torbett. Not so - even though, when it comes to implementing the strategies, the Achiever significantly outdoes the Opportunist (‘wins any way possible’), the Diplomat (‘avoids overt conflict’) and the Expert (‘rules by logic and expertise’).
But the Achiever in turn is beaten to the performance punch by three others: the Alchemist (‘generates social transformations’), the Strategist (this type ‘generates organisational and personal transformations’), and the Individualist (‘interweaves competing personal and company action logics’).
OBVIOUS PARADOX
The paradox in this classification is obvious. How can any of the other six types perform well without the Achiever’s ability to effectively achieve goals through teams? For that matter, how can the Achiever succeed without deploying the powers of the Diplomat, etc? And why does the Achiever account for 30% of the research sample, three times as many as those described as Alchemists and Strategists, if the latter are ‘most effective for organisational leadership’?
The questions recall Meredith Belbin’s first, famous account of the seven roles needed for team success: coordinator, ideas person, critic, implementer, external contact, inspector, team-builder. Somebody has to fill each role, and the team leader (a role not identified with any of the seven) has a part to play under each heading. The same truth applies to the Rooke-Torbert types. The Achiever-leader plays many parts, but only in part. The rest is delegation. That’s what gives teams their special strength and their pole position in today’s races for success. That demon, human nature, has many facets, good and bad. The well-led team of well-chosen, well-deployed people negates the bad and accentuates the good - and everybody wins.
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