Let's Come Together

The unbelievable importance of teams

Heart of the Matter

To me, the most important unit in organisations is the team. Teams are where it’s at.

We’ve become obsessed with leadership, with culture, with individual personalities and strengths and yet the biggest force multiplier out there is a really good team.

Culture sits in the team. As Buckingham and Goodall point out in ‘Nine Lies about Work’, our experience of work, and therefore the ‘culture’, is our interaction with the teams we belong to. The ‘corporate culture’ is more like the climate that we sit in. We can endure a poor climate if we’re in a good team. A good climate will make life better, but it won’t compensate for a being in a bad team.

Performance sits in the team. Teams are where the work actually gets done. You could take away most of the senior management and corporate functions and teams would still get work done. The opposite most certainly is not true.

Motivation sits in the team. The knowledge that your peers have got your back, married to the desire not to let them down, will get your juices flowing and push you to levels you never imagined. The sheer joy of working in a good team will make you want to just do more of it.

Socialisation sits in the team. These are the people you really get to know, the ones you go through the ups and downs with, the ones you bond with. You develop deep relationships and friendships that last beyond the scope of the team (I still have friends from teams I was in 30+ years ago). Having friends at work increases engagement, performance and length of stay, and those friends are most likely to be your team mates. Workplace isolation is an actual (and growing) problem that people experience because they are not part of a team and so lack contact and connection with others.

People LOVE being in a great team.

So why do they get so little attention?

Most organisations have no idea how many teams they have, how many teams people belong to, or much visibility of teams beyond the org chart. They spend much less per person on training people to be in teams than they do on training people to lead them (about 3x more on leadership, according to some desk research done by my mate Perry Timms). And we can all see how well that’s working out.

Could it be Magic?

Maybe the problem is that teams are complex, messy, unpredictable, unfathomable things. They confound us and surprise us. We can’t really explain how they work and we find it hard to accept that, when they work well, it’s really a kind of magic.

There’s no formula for teams. You can do all the profiling and screening and assemble the most promising collection of people and then find they just don’t work as a team, whilst some unlikely, unassuming ragbag of unrated unknowns will gel and knock it out of the park. This is the enduring attraction of team sports, which even a massive imbalance of resources can’t entirely eliminate.

In his recent presentation for Inspiring Workplaces on “Inspiring Teams - the REAL unit of change’, my mate Perry referenced the work of J. Richard Hackman, Harvard Professor of Org Psych, who identified 5 crucial factors for teams

1. Compelling direction

2. Strong structure

3. Supportive context

4. Competent coaching

5. ‘Real Team’

It is a collective approach, not one based on individual psychological or behavioural factors. His research was done half a century ago and so it needs a little updating to the modern context, but it’s still applicable today. Can we really add much more understanding to it?

In his reference to a ‘Real Team’, he is referring to the intangible bond that develops in a great team. People aren’t there for show, they are not performing, they really care for each other and will put themselves on the line for their teammates and the team as a whole.

Notice anything missing? There’s no ‘heroic leader’, or transformational, inspirational, servant or any other type. Teams need leadership, at times. They need leaders. They don’t need ‘a leader’.

Simon Kuper and Stefan Symanski did an analysis of sports teams to determine the impact of the coach on performance and found that it was less than 10% (and have shown this is similarly true in business). So why all the extra investment and attention on ‘leaders’? 10% extra in sport makes a huge difference, where the margins of victory are small and there’s only one winner.  In business, where there are many more variables and greater influence from external factors, it is going to be of much less, and possibly no, significance.

There is magic in teams but we don’t need a magician to make it happen. So let’s stop looking for them.

Bits and Pieces

As often seems to be the case, organisations seem to be set up to prevent the very things they say that they want. Collaboration, belonging, innovation, breakthroughs - all the things they desire are products of having healthy, high-performing teams. Yet organisations focus on individual personality traits and behaviours, on leaders, on individual performance and reward and on cultural fit, all of which inhibit what teams need.

Teams need diversity, they need challenge, they need conflict and they need people to show up as themselves.

Cultural fit is most stupid of these inhibitors. It reduces diversity, encourages groupthink, minimises challenge and conflict, and values fitting in above having impact. It leads to the ostracising of the independent thinkers, the ironists, the rebels, the activists and all the other types that actually bring the innovation and the breakthroughs. They are  grit that cause the pearl to form.

Being a good team member and being disruptive are not mutually exclusive. In fact, being disruptive can be the most important contribution a person make to the team. Every great team has people who disrupt things when it’s needed, who aren’t afraid to stand for what they believe with and cause some creative conflict. Yet most organisations label them as troublemakers and neutralise or exorcise them.

And then wonder why they get average teams and mediocre performance.

Connected

It’s my view that the best way forward for organisations is to become networks of self-organising teams. This unleashes the power of teams and gives organisations greater flexibility, dynamism, responsiveness and resilience. There are plenty of progressive organisations that are moving in this direction, from Buurtzorg to Spotify to Haier. The technology to enable this at scale is available and the advantages are apparent. Greater innovation, less bureaucracy and more engaged and fulfilled employees. What’s not to like?

Unless you are one of those people who have had all that expensive leadership education and now find it isn’t any use, and that without the hierarchy your power and status has been greatly diminished. You’re going to hate it.

Of course, the Pirates of the Golden Age were the first to tap into the power of teams. They formed crews that operated in an agile way and collaborated at scale. They beat their opponents, the hierarchical and bureaucratic Navy, despite the overwhelming odds against them. The Navy eventually quelled them by focusing huge resources on the task, but only after decades of being outwitted and outperformed by the Pirates.

The Pirates were pioneers of the latest technology, not just in the way they organised themselves but also their armaments, their ships, the tactics and the strategies they used.  It was by marrying the magic of teams with the latest tech that they realised their extraordinary achievements.

Just imagine how far they might have gone if they’d had computers and the internet.

Well, today’s pirates have. If I was the Navy, I’d be a little scared.