What an amazing few weeks this has been for teams, both dysfunctional and exceptionally successful! We’ve seen the continued futility of Major League Baseball’s All Star pageant, which throws its best players together for one game, and still expects All Star performance; and the Justice department’s bizarre efforts to break-up a “team” of attorneys that have apparently become disenchanted with their assignment to challenge the Supreme Court’s rulings on adding a citizenship question to the Census. At the same time, however, we’ve been treated to celebrations of wildly successful teams as well, including reminiscing about the Apollo 11 team, astronauts and ground crew, all of whom had the right stuff and achieved Man’s first visit to a another world, reminding us of what a great team can accomplish, and the extraordinary performance of the U.S. Women’s National Team in winning the Women’s World Cup in Soccer, which it did with a team of diversity and outspoken individuality. Each of these occasions commanded widespread attention, each had the word “teams” plastered all over the event, and yet, each failed to really display any leadership lessons from the case in question. How typical for team discussions!
Teams are the dominant unit of work in the 21st century. Startup teams provide the hope of our future. Teams are one thing that most of us have in common; we’re all, or most of us, on one team or another, often several. Yet, teams are the most abused term you can find in the lexicon of managerial lingo. Observations such as “what a team!”, “build a team,” and “we’ve got a great team!” are bandied around many times in our daily lives, without any sort of analytical precision, as if all teams are same, or should be. With the exception of Megan Rapinoe’s observation that the American Women’s team was made up of "pink hair and purple hair. We got tattoos and dreadlocks. We got white girls and black girls and everything in between. We got straight girls and gay girls,” which underscored the power of diversity, there were really no memorable take-aways about what makes a great team great. This is unfortunate, because it seems from my executive education classroom perspective that while we’re all immersed in team experiences, we really don’t think analytically about how they work, or how they could work better. So, in the spirit of filling-in some missing team insights, let me suggest a few that hopefully will inspire more:
- Teams are the basic building-block of our organizational society. They are too important to be casually treated.
- Instead of talking about “teams,” as nouns, we should be speaking, as Amy C. Edmondson has suggested, about the verb “teaming.” It is what happens within the teams that is really important, not the teams themselves.
- All too often, the word “harmony” is out of place in team design. Tom Peters once characterized “hot teams” as “lov[ing] the task, not necessarily one another,” and Andy Boynton and I have long thought that when big change is involved, “polite teams get polite results.”
- Every team is different, but that shouldn’t be by chance. Real thought should be applied to such choices as: who is on the team, how the team-experience should add to their development, what sorts of behavior do we expect as part of teaming, and at what point has the team run its course?
- The difference between high and low team performance is the outcome of managerial choices; not making a choice is defaulting on leadership responsibility, but is still a choice endorsing the status-quo ante, nonetheless.
- Teams are opportunities to leverage intellect and make a difference. They should be seen in that light; they are testing grounds for new ideas, and idea-launchers, and represent our best weapon to resist stultifying bureaucracy. In-team performance matters as much as overall team performance. After all, success is fleeting, but there is always another team assignment just around the corner.
- Conversations are the real life-blood of any team. Leadership should spend considerable time thinking about how to make team conversations as powerful as possible. Each team, as with each jazz-ensemble, has lead-voices and accompaniment, and they need to operate so that we get the best overall results from superb individual performers. The old saying that “there is no I in teams,” is about as correct as an alternative that “there is no we in teams, either.” The challenge is to encourage, particularly when big change is in the offing, exceptional individual contributions from virtuoso performers, within a team context; not to average out individual performance to some harmonious team norm.
- As with all big organizational decisions, outside-in should be the compass for big team choices. Consequently, I believe that all team choices begin with the situational context that the team is facing; teams created to make big jumps, or facing great urgency, should look and feel different from teams that are involved in achieving incremental excellence. Both types of teams are important, but everything else about them should be different.
- The real test to every team question is answering the question “Are we doing our best work possible?” “Are we making full use of the talent entrusted to us?”
- Nostalgia has no place in team discussions. Teams are tools that help us achieve organizational goals. They each have a shelf-life that warns us that just because they succeeded in the past they may not be fit for purpose in the future. We should celebrate their success and move on.
Try these out on the teams mentioned earlier. I believe that all too often dysfunctional teams are the result of leadership not taking the time to consider the talent that makes up a team and treating them, instead, as a whole [noun] rather than a collection of talented, but different individual behaviors [verbs].
