The issue, as the following article explains, is that though humans tend to be social animals, they also like to work alone in many circumstances. And the latter day emphasis on teams is often considered a distraction from the 'real work' of whatever enterprise in which one is engaged. But in the digital economy, making teams function effectively may be crucial to the real work. Both people and organizations need to figure out how and why if they want to prevail. JL
Brooke Manville comments in Forbes:
Some of us like the collegiality of teams, but others find them a huge source of frustration. Too much talking, unclear responsibilities, group-think instead of action: can’t we just get on with it? Why is all this team stuff taking so long? A team might be the right size, agree on performance goals and purpose, but not about a shared way of working together. If they don’t, they’ll fail.” Purpose has always depended on performance, and vice-versa.
Right now your job probably means being part of team—or even several. Collaboration, group problem-solving, and shared responsibility for deliverables are now norms of organizational life. You may think of yourself as a spirited individual, but you really don’t work alone anymore. You belong to today’s teaming masses.
Some of us like the collegiality of teams, but others find them a huge source of frustration. Too much talking, unclear responsibilities, group-think instead of action: can’t we just get on with it? Why is all this team stuff taking so long?
What Makes Teaming Hard?
Such questions swirl daily as teaming continues to grow as a trend. Deloitte’s 2016 human capital survey reported nine out of 10 global leaders are redesigning their organizations, shifting towards networked cross-functional teams. Yet, only about 20% of the surveyed executives reported their expertise to do that.
Welcome to the 80%. Teams are hard to make work—and most people have trouble understanding not just how but why. Hackman’s lament lives on:“teams usually do less well—not better—than the sum of their members’ individual contributions.” A recent essay by T.J. Elliott hypothesized that our ongoing bumbling with teams may help explain the mysterious flagging of American productivity.
Meanwhile, no shortage of research about how to “fix the teaming problem.” Most targets the interpersonal human issues: create more empathy, transparency, safe spaces, less ego, etc. All good things to have in a workplace—but for my money, building a “better community of relationships” doesn’t get to the deeper value of managing effective teams.
Back To The Sources
So I thought it might be time to return ad fontes: back to the sources. Why in the first place did teams get invented? What historically has made them most successful? I called the two guys who put teams on the modern business map: Jon Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith
Of course they didn’t “invent” teams (as old as humanity itself)—but their 1993 global best-seller, The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High Performance Organization—was a breakthrough in professionalizing the construct: the first focused analysis of what became a revolutionary business phenomenon in the dawning age of globalization, the Internet, and large-scale organizational change (Yes, Virginia, there was an earlier time when most businesses did NOT expect everyone to work in teams). Wisdom of Teams has been issued and re-issued multiple times, selling over 500,000 units and used by millions of practitioners across the globe.
“So what, gentlemen,” I asked, “has been learned about teams and teaming since you first published your book? Are the lessons from 1993 still valid? What’s changed? And why does teaming still cause so much heartburn in the business world?”
Katz (as he likes to be called) and Smith wrote the book while at McKinsey in the early 1990s. Still friends today, they’ve gone their separate ways since then. Katz now heads a PWC organizational research center while Doug runs his own consulting practice focused on “challenge-based leadership” for organizations across all sectors. Together they have
an awe-inspiring legacy of published research and front-line experience in building team effectiveness. And they still have plenty to say about the subject that launched their global best-seller a generation ago.
Six key learnings from my recent conversations with them:
1.Teams Matter Because They Are The Critical Engines Of Change
Most of us understand that today’s harsh global competition puts an increasing premium on leveraging different skills and experience for world-class innovation and problem-solving; in the Knowledge Economy, more knowledge—mustered among smart people working together– wins. Teams done right outcompete individuals any day.
Doug Smith reframed the common wisdom from another angle:“If you look back through history, no major change has ever happened without some kind of team. Change is driven when a team rallies together to meet a challenge, and create some higher level of performance—beyond what any individual can effect alone.”
“We conceived our book when Katz and I realized that everyone in the early 1990s was writing about ‘change management.’ Organizations today, more than ever, must struggle to change and adapt. But the first generation of change thinking was operating at too high level, ignoring what makes for actual success on the ground—small groups of committed people. We both realized it was time to tackle the fundamental unit of analysis for meeting any competitive challenge: teams. With today’s volatile operating climate, teams are becoming even more critical.”
2. Successful Teaming Requires Understanding Why A Team Exists.
“So what actually is a ‘team’?” I asked. They summoned up the verbatim essence of their book: “A small number of people (typically fewer than ten) with complementary skills who are committed to common purpose, performance goals, and approach– for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”
Each of the phrases matters, encapsulating the key success factors extracted from hundreds of teams they originally studied. Nothing they’ve seen since 1993 has substantially changed their minds. “It’s not accidental that we have always described this as a discipline,” reflected Katz. “The same pattern holds today. Success absolutely depends on the would-be team adhering, consistently, to each of the dimensions in our framework. For example, a team might be the right size, agree on performance goals and purpose, but not about a shared way of working together. If they don’t, they’ll fail.”
Smith underscored an under-appreciated element. “Everyone talks about organizational purpose today, but too often they forget about performance. We very intentionally combined and stressed both.”
“Purpose has always depended on performance, and vice-versa. Winning for a cause that the team cares about provides the energy that distinguishes a true team. Thousands of years have shown that when people focus on something beyond themselves—and achieve goals towards that end—it brings out the best in everyone. Morale doesn’t come from picnics and backrubs in the office. It comes from people succeeding together.”
3. Missteps With Process And Application Undermine The Discipline of Teams
So why is this taking so long? Smith was adamant about organizations’ continuing confusion between activities and outcomes. The misunderstanding plagues teaming because “people believe that ‘the process of being a team’ is more important than the performance goals that justify why a team exists. As soon as the objective is seen as ‘becoming a team,’ people lose sight of the fundamental performance purpose for working together.”
He elaborated with a metaphor. “You can throw a stone into a calm lake and then become obsessed with the ripples of the splash, and the ripples of the ripples. And soon you’re forgetting about the central core — where and why you threw the stone in the first place. When people get caught up with topics like trust, structure, rapport among members, they can blur the existential purpose: performance, performance, performance. Google’s Project Aristotle missed the whole point. They focused on HR-style correlations for effectiveness, but not the root cause of success: when team members relentlessly commit themselves to achieving higher performance.”
Katz highlighted a second barrier. “We always said that a team approach is not suited to every situation. Leaders struggle if they try to turn everything into a team.”
“Good work can productively get done—without the overhead of a team– by what we might call a simple ‘working group.’ A looser assembly of people can exchange information and collaborate without committing themselves to shared goals and collective accountability—which are always difficult. Many senior executive groups, coming together from
different business units in a company, function this way— but not as a real team. Nor should they necessarily try to be.”
“Things are even more difficult today, because of the more complex organizational landscape: networks, communities, open initiatives, purpose-driven councils (e.g. to foster diversity or quality), value chains, etc. etc. To try to make any of these into ‘a team’—in the disciplined and focused manner of mutually accountable performance—can be disastrous. Team performance comes at a cost many situations don’t call for.”
4. The Discipline Of Teams Must Still Embrace Human Factors
Though both authors held firm to the all-important focus on performance as the purpose of teaming, they also acknowledged the relevance of human dimensions.
“We’re all much more attuned to the emotional aspects of management behavior now,” said Katz, “which I might amplify more in our story. Our book perhaps over-emphasized the rational arguments for successful teams.”
Doug offered a similar perspective. “Effective teaming is really a Venn diagram. The most important circle has to be the focus on performance. But I don’t want to discount a second circle of relationships—they are the social glue that sustains human interaction over time. Organizations, networks and communities are built on relationships. Every team needs to consider them in what they do, overlapping with performance. Problems arise when leaders focus on just one circle—especially relationships–as the ultimate purpose of a team. That won’t work. But ignoring relationships also violates a key element of the discipline: shared accountability.”
Katz added some additional insights about organizational cultures. “In recent years, I’ve come to appreciate the complexity of organizational cultures—I use the plural, because no company has just one—and the great opportunity they provide for establishing context and emotional energy that positively impacts building a great team.”
“Strong teaming benefits from existing cultural forces in a company—and most cultural challenges benefit in turn from applying the teaming discipline in key places. It’s a much more effective intervention than broadly trying to ‘change a culture’.”
5. Leaders Face Increasing Complexity In Building Teams—And Must Manage Accordingly
As Katz reflected on teaming and organizational culture, he amplified comments on relevant evolution of the last twenty years, and the implications for team-driven leaders: the increasing complexity of the organizational landscape that reinforce more nuanced judgment about when to take a team approach (or not); the shortening time-frames of business that requires teaming that leverages the episodic opportunity of different company cultures in different ways; the rising
influence of historically under-appreciated informal leaders, often middle-managers, whose authentic and knowledgeable profile in a company naturally attracts people to work with them.
When I asked Katz specifically about the best leaders who build and guide teams, he emphasized action over words: “They model the performance focus and collective responsibility themselves. What they actually do for, and within a team, means twice as much as anything they say.”
6. Well-Run Teams Allow Every Organization To Reach Higher
Doug Smith finished on a more philosophical note, revisiting his 2004 book On Values and Values. “With technology and other global changes of the last twenty years, we don’t have place-based structures anymore. People increasingly live in networks, markets, and yes, often teams. Ultimately the endgame has to be to rediscover a safe and fair society for all.”
“Good leaders understand the way to achieve that is to effect change, by bringing together performance and purpose with their people, for something bigger than everyone. In the best case, teams—and then indeed teams of teams—are a building block to achieve that. The discipline of teams we talk about is not just strategic; it’s also a fundamentally moral value. What could be more relevant today?”
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