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 "Contracts are a small part of relationships. A complete relationship needs a covenant."
- Max DePree
President of Herman Miller Inc.
It happens pretty often. I'll get a call. A voice in quiet
desperation at the end of the line says, "We need some of
that team building stuff all you consultant guys do! I think
we need it pretty soon, too."
Being a top-notch consultant, I ask a few powerful, probing questions that took many years of graduate study to learn, like; "Well, what do you mean by team building?" or "What's the reason you need this program?"
Desperate voice: "Well, you know, our communications aren't so good and, ah, well, we just aren't operating much like a team…blah, blah, blah."
Sometimes the desperate voice has a real team building issue
on his hands and sometimes he would be better off not to do
team building, but to file Chapter 11. But calls like this
are frequent for anyone in the consulting business because
if anything has been hot for the last decade, and will continue
to be in big demand in the new millennium, it is high-performance
teams. Corporate America has decided it can't get along without
teams, and it has done so for good reason.
Organizational leadership in 2007 and beyond will not be about individuals; rather, it will be about groups of individuals connected as real teams. The myth of cowboy entrepreneurs and leaders single-handedly developing vision and strategy and motivating others to implement it is neither real nor helpful. Yes, individual talent and genius is and always will be with us, but it is most effective when harnessed within a team effort, where the collective synergy of individual contributors can bring the vision into reality.
The first step to building your team is to measure its performance against some of the characteristics of high-performance teams. Ask yourself whether your team has:
- A sense of strategy and positioning, at least responding to, but hopefully anticipating, its customers' ever-changing needs.
- Its vision, mission, goals, roles, and tactics in place.
- A clear understanding of its own capabilities and limits, strengths, and weaknesses.
- Deep, open and ongoing relationships with customers.
- Deep and open relationships within the team, where team members respect each other's differences and trust each other's intentions.
- An understanding that diversity is the team's strength and
that diversity leads to conflict - thus, learning how to
fight fairly and how to disagree without being disagreeable
is paramount.
- A technology in place (set of techniques) to creatively attack problems and make good decisions.
- The capacity to seek new opportunities while streamlining and perfecting current operations.
- A balanced capacity to produce results (effectiveness) with the least effort (efficiency).
- A well developed sense of when to celebrate, when to spread
the credit, and when to have fun.
All of these characteristics of high-performance teams have a chance of happening when the team members have a deep and abiding trust for each other. I don't believe in that old phrase, "You don't have to like someone to work with them, but you do have to respect them." That misses the point about real team synergy, where you don't just try to work with someone, you attempt to work very well with them. It has been said that teammates have to have more than respect for one another, they need a sense of reverence. A team is not a collection of contracts but a covenant.
Real team covenants happen when trust acts as the team's cornerstone. Only with a shared vision can a cohesive direction for a team be established. The team's vision is based in large part upon the values that are shared by all the members on the team.
All this is to say that teams need more than the usual goals that are set up as the normal stuff of team-building events. Goals are great and essential for teams, but goals are not enough. Teams need an overreaching purpose that enriches the goal-setting process into a sense of mission. Whether it is an executive team planning a global marketing strategy or a self-managed team of front-line workers making widgets at Acme Screw and Gear, a team's true foundation is its commitment to a purpose larger than itself, a purpose that has quality-of-life impact on customers, fellow employees, the community, or the future.
A team's purpose is not to be taken for granted. Team purposes change, grow, evolve, devolve, split, splinter, get more complex, simplify, and multiply as the individuals on the team change, as the companies they are part of change, and as the customers they serve change.
A team doesn't just "have" a purpose, any more than a couple "has" a marriage. It discovers and nurtures it.
Through hard work and the kind of discussion that engages people in real talk and sharing from the core of themselves, team members can begin to articulate the most appropriate purpose of the team for its current stage. New corporate teams ought to be worried about survival, and elder-statesmen teams ought to be concerned about their contribution to the welfare of the community.
Usually the purpose and mission of high-performance teams coalesces around its collective vision of not one but several factors: experiencing the joy of achievement and the internal satisfaction of competence, serving customers with high-quality products and services, making the company or department healthier and more profitable, serving the community, making the world a better place, and making money and providing a fair livelihood for all the members of the team and those they support. The more articulate the team members can be about these factors and their importance, the more likely it can move into high gear and become a high-performance team.
It takes a lot of energy for a work group to become a team and almost
as much energy for a team to regularly renew itself and its
covenant. Covenant maintenance at work is always a demanding
process, which makes it, like most important things, very
simple and extremely hard to do. The reports, however, from
those who have experienced life in the left lane on a high-performance
team suggest that the rewards are worth the effort. |
