“One for all and all for One”. How often do you use the term Team in your work environment? Are they really a team? Should they be a Team? Can your Senior Managers REALLY work as a Team? Does it make good business sense to have a focus on Teams? Throwing around the terms Team and teamwork brings up many different ideas of what those terms mean.
Peter Drucker is an extraordinary conceptual thinker. At the age of 92, he perceived fine nuances of management practice better than anybody in the world. His article There’s More Than One Kind of Team (The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, Feb. 11, 1992) is a must reading for all executives.
Drucker pointed out that Team and team building had become a business buzzword. Businesses spend thousands if not millions of dollars teaching work groups how to be Teams. To what end? What was the ROI on this workplace emphasis on Teams and teamwork? Actual results have been mixed. Many companies who embraced the concept early (e.g., Ford, GM’s, Saturn, P&G) began to soft-pedal their initial fanfare. Many are reverting back to individual vs. team accountability. The main reason I believe is they couldn’t find the ROI on their investment or correlate business outcomes with good or bad teamwork and in some cases found a dark side to teams.
Is this emphasis on Team just another business fad that makes a lot of money for consultants? Drucker observed one problem with teams; senior leaders perceive only one definition of a team and it’s usually around a sports team. Drucker thought there are three prototype teams. I personally don’t focus on what the prototype is. My fundamental question or thinking is always first asking the question, what is the overriding need to structure a Team for a given function or task?
Team isn’t about making people in a work group feel good about each other, it’s about changing the dynamics of the group to accomplish a necessary goal(s). In the military there is a basic axiom about warfare as a solider: you are not fighting to personally survive, you a fighting to make sure the soldier on either side of you does. The military is organized around ‘groups’ or teams of people. You and the person next too you are the smallest ‘Team’. The smallest, a Squad has 8-10 people, and a Corp, the largest, can have up to 45k soldiers on the team. No matter which team everyone knows their job and goal(s). So where am I going with this? Back to my original question about Team: what’s the overriding need to structure a Team, what is the Goal that each and every member can ‘buy’ into, that each knows their role on the team and believes if they accomplish their Team goal, individually they will accomplish their personal goals.
Here is a real-life story of what I think illustrates a number of requirements that go into making a ‘pure’ Team. I will refer back to it in this series on Team. NOTE: an Army rifle squad is cross trained, they have individual roles as well as understanding each other’s role.
It’s 1990, you are a member of a rifle squad on a C 130 air cargo transport on your way to Saudi Arabia as part of the 82nd Airborne. At a refueling stop in West Germany you are allowed off the plane if you want to mail a letter home. Once back in the air and on the way, you get your orders. You are told that you are to be the ‘speed bump’ to slow down the Iraqi military forces that are supposed to flood into Saudi Arabia. Casualties are expected to be around 50%, and your goal is too ‘just slow them down’ for everything that’s coming behind you to ‘catch up’. You land and it’s 105 degrees at 10:30 a.m. and you and your squad have been seating around in the desert talking because you were told to stand-by for orders. The average age of the squad is somewhere around 19, the squad leader is the old guy. Discussion amongst the squad turns to many things but what’s really on everyone’s mind is surviving which the conversation turns to. The squad comes to an understanding individually that the highest percentage survival for them individually is for each person to rely on the other members of the squad. In other words, if I only look out for myself my chances of survival go down. If I do my job and look out for everyone else my chances increase dramatically. The squad decided on a Squad goal; that everyone in the squad would make it back to Fort Bragg alive. A short-term goal was for the team to see the sun come up every morning as a team. They had a long term and short-term Team goal(s), and they organized their days around what needed to be accomplished to achieve those goals. Each morning they stood together having coffee and watched the sun come up.
Why this story? It is probably the ‘purists’ example of a true Team I know of and also the easiest to visualize the basic components of a true Team. Clear roles and goals, true alliance on each individual member to accomplish their personal goal, conflict between Team goal and individuals goals are clear and resolvable. Other than being in a war zone they were like any other team, NOT really.
During this series on Team, I will tackle the most difficult business environment to have a Team, amongst senior managers or as I refer to them ‘The Team at The Top”. In a some cases this group is not called a Team, but the President, Owner, CEO, (you name the title) consciously or unconsciously look to this group to work together to accomplish the goals of the business. These people are the highest paid, industry veterans and probably the most educated people in the organization. Why then is it so difficult for them to work together as a Team? Is it possible to really get a group like this too be a Team? When and where should I use a Team?
Next time I will start looking at Drucker’s perceptive on Team and the different types of Teams which is the second most common mistake made in a work environment, e.g., ‘one type fits all needs.’ Here is something to always keep in mind: Teams are tools. Whenever people work together, they do so as some form of Team. Which team to use for what purpose is a crucial, difficult, and risky decision that is even harder to unmake.