The Problem(s) with Teams
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management
It’s increasingly likely that you will spend a good deal of your professional time working on temporary teams. It’s also likely that you will experience a fair amount of frustration and even team failure along the way.
Most organizations have yet to meet a problem (or opportunity) that they won’t throw a team at to solve. Let’s face it, it’s tempting to assume that a group of motivated, diverse individuals will trump the lone soldier when it comes to creativity, problem-solving and planning.
Or, at least it’s comfortable to think so.
Harvard Professor, J. Richard Hackman, author of the outstanding book, Leading Teams, and Professor Leigh Thompson at Kellogg (Northwestern) and author of another outstanding book, Making the Team, offer their separate but similar insights on the world of teams and teaming. We are well served to consider their findings.
Professor Hackman in an interview in Harvard Business Review: “I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary… But don’t count on it.”
and
“Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have. That’s because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of collaboration.”
In a similar vein, Professor Thompson offers in her book, Making the Team, “Teams are not always the answer- teams may provide insight, creativity, and knowledge in a way that a person working independently cannot but teamwork may also lead to confusion, delay, and poor decision-making.”
Fallacies and Challenges to Conventional Thinking About Teams:
Professor Hackman identifies some common fallacies, including:
- More inclusion is better. Art’s comments: Increased group size adds new complexities and the common practice of including people due to ego or politics breeds a whole set of dysfunctional issues.
- Harmony is required for high team performance. Art’s comments: There’s certainly a natural desire for people to work in an environment where the tension is low. This is another area where research contradicts traditional thinking. Teams with some tension may very well out-perform the more collegial groups.
- Having a deviant in the group is bad. Art’s comments: Interesting word choice. This deviant…the person capable of standing up against the group-think of teams is similar to the character referenced in my post, Help Wanted-Leaders with Moral Courage, and similar to the Heretic referenced by management blogger (No Smoke and Mirrors) and frequent commenter at this site, Mark Allen Roberts. The potential for massive decision-making errors in group settings is countered by ensuring someone is confident enough to challenge the conventional thinking at the right time.
- Long-standing teams lose their edge as members grow to accept the shortcomings and foibles of others. Art’s comments: the research conducted by Hackman and others indicates just the opposite. Long-standing teams offer the potential for significantly improved quality and performance.
Professor Thompson challenges conventional thinking about teams with the following:
- Conflict among team members is not always a bad thing-it may be necessary for effective decision making as it can foment accuracy, insight, understanding, trust and innovation.
- Strong leadership is not always necessary for strong teams-a leader has two main functions: structure the team environment and coach the team members.
- Good teams can still fail under the wrong circumstances. To be successful in the long run, teams need ongoing resources and support.
And finally, a comment from Professor Thompson on that classic of all techniques to straighten out the dysfunctional team, the Retreat.
- Retreats will not fix all conflicts between team members unless they address the structural and design problems that plague the team on a day-to-day basis in the work environment.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
It’s relatively easy to generate a saccharine-sweet list of things that we need to do to create effective teams. We’ll get to the list of best practices right after we spend some time thinking about the pitfalls and obstacles that make effective team development a tough job.
There’s no doubt in my mind that it is increasingly critical for us to learn how to perform well on teams and how to create high performing teams. It’s also important to recognize that for some issues, the reflex action to “put a team on it,” may be wrong. Thanks to Professors Hackman and Thompson, you’ve got some research-backed food for thought as you consider how to improve team performance.
I’ll be back soon with some thoughts on the decision-making pitfalls of groups. Yes, it turns out that we’ve got a lot of problems in this area as well.
Hey, this would be easy if it weren’t for the people…
Leadership Caffeine for the Week of March 30, 2009
Filed under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management, Surviving Lousy Leaders
A healthy spring snowstorm blanketed the northwest suburbs of Chicago overnight, making the morning cup of coffee particularly relevant as a source of both warmth and energy.
I’m back with a fresh pound of my favorite fair trade Mexican Roast from a great local roaster aptly named Conscious Cup. My first contribution to stimulating the economy today is to let you know that these great people ship.
My second contribution is to encourage a renewed sense of personal professional accountability. Yep, I’m striking a blow against Boss-Blame…that world class sport that so many engage in as part of rationalizing why their own results might just be falling short of something resembling excellence.
Quit Grousing…It’s Wasted Energy!
It’s common for me to hear quite a bit of grousing about the people we work for from attendees at workshops, at client sites or in classes. And while I don’t doubt that there’s a fair amount of truth in much of the talk about lousy managers and do-nothing exec teams, I truly don’t care and neither should you.
Do not let the chucklehead that you work for hold you back! Do not blame the management team for your inability to hit your targets, develop professionally or create a high performance team. The only one in charge of you is you.
I’ve long since concluded that in spite of our best intentions we have a low probability of fixing most of the bad bosses. Our best bet and your best bet is to develop a multi-pronged approach to the situation.
Suggestions for Overcoming Bad Boss Syndrome:
1. Mitigation. Sometimes “Bad Boss” syndrome can be mitigated by changing your own behavior. I’ve observed many situations where the boss has issues and the individuals that report to him or her have no qualms publicly depicting their lack of respect. While that might in some perverted way feel good, it is wrong.
Try using judo on the situation and increase your efforts to be respectful and helpful and to portray a genuine sense of empathy for the burdens that this individuals bears as a leader and as a person. Hey, no guarantees here, but you’ll be the better person for trying, and it might be you some latitude in the workplace.
2. Partnering. I work with many different project teams in IT and new product development, and I can predict with near certainty the top reasons that will surface in the post-mortem on failed projects. You know the issues as well, and yes, most of them have to do with people and leadership. (An oft-quoted E&Y study indicates that 80% of the reasons associated with poor project performance are tied to people.)
Work on a few project teams, and you can predict the problems like clockwork. Estimates will be off…people sandbag or play politics. The matrix gets in the way…people have multiple priorities and are not linked to one team. The sponsor spends her time jetting around Asia and is never present at critical times to do what a sponsor is supposed to do. And so on.
What is stopping you from working with your peers to focus your collective energies on eradicating the mostly controllable and predictable problems that bedevil so many teams? Nothing! If the project manager lacks the leadership savvy to broker resolutions and build a performance culture, jump in along with your peers and help out. Have an ineffective sponsor? Either educate him or her on the role or seek out a new one. There are few problems that arise that are dependent upon those upstream.
3. Your Personal Pursuit of Excellence:
In the final leg of my bad-boss mitigation & you must develop your own sense of accountability rant, this is for all of you first-time or mid-level leaders that are not getting the support and coaching that you genuinely should receive. Get over it, and make certain that you go to extraordinary lengths to give to your colleagues in spades what you are not receiving from your manager.
Boss not talked to you about career development? Well, you are in charge of your own career, and oh by the way, nothing is precluding you from working with your team members on their own personal development plans.
Don’t get much feedback on your performance? That’s unfortunate, but it is not an excuse for you not recognizing that feedback is your most powerful performance tool and practicing it constantly.
Does the boss work hard to protect turf and strengthen silo walls? Don’t fall into that shortsighted trap. Become a network broker across organizational boundaries. Learn and apply the art of lateral leadership and diplomacy.
The bottom-line
Just as it is common in life for people to hitch their sense of well-being and happiness to the actions and opinions of others, it is common for people to wallow in business misery because of the shortcomings of our leaders. It’s time to unhitch that wagon and take responsibility for your own business happiness and health. Get started this week!
What’s Your High Performance Team Experience?
Filed under: Career, Performance, Professional Growth, Project Management
I love to talk with people that have led or been part of a high performance team (HPT). Their enthusiasm is palpable. These individuals have been to the promised land of corporate collaboration and achievement for a brief period in time and they are interested in going back.
I imagine that the experience of working on a HPT is a lot like winning a major sports championship. Since I’ve been part of several HPTs, the imagine part is the major sports championship. I would like to win the Super Bowl, but it’s probably not in the cards. I’ll have to settle with coaching teams and professionals to win the Super Bowl of project and business execution.
I talk with professionals a great deal about the topic of creating and leading HPTs, and invariably a part of the discussion includes defining just what this is. Instead of offering my own sanitized, politically correct version of a HPT, I facilitate a group definition. The exercise usually starts slow and builds. I’ll paraphrase from recent flip chart notes.
A High Performance Team:
- Meets or exceeds objectives.
- A group that other people want to be a part of.
- Focused on the end goal-passionate about the work.
- Camaraderie
- “We couldn’t wait to get to work.” and “Hated when the project ended.”
- Group of people that thrive on meeting and beating challenges.
- Group on a mission that is bigger than individual jobs.
- Group that knows how to turn the unknowns into actions. (A learning team)
- Operates with distinct set of values and a focus on personal accountability.
- Knows how to fight and play together while focusing on objectives.
- Celebrates victories and turns setbacks into new challenges
At this point, the discussion took off around the many characteristics behind these statements…mission, culture, context, accomplishment, values, personal identification and behavior and I quit capturing notes. The gross majority agrees that participating on a HPT that has some or all of the above characteristics is highly desirable.
I inadvertently triggered an interesting flurry of tweets on this topic on Twitter yesterday, when I indicated that my formal and informal poll of professionals at all levels and in all different functions and industries shows that only 30% or so of professionals believe that they have been part of anything that resembles the HPT defined above.
For those research purists, I’ll doubt you see my results showing up in an HBR article anytime soon, but the combination of “show of hands” and formal survey responses coupled with many hours of group discussions about this topic leaves me comfortable that the percentage is closer to accurate than not. Of the 30% that do believe that they’ve been on a HPT, the majority indicates that they have not had this experience more than twice.
The disturbing outcome of this discussion is always around the “why not?” for the other seventy percent. The answers of course ultimately point back to issues of leadership and the over-riding leadership and performance culture. Simply stated, the firm’s leaders have not created the environment needed for high performance teams to develop.
We learn from both our successes and our failures. For now, I am most interested in hearing about your own professional experience as part of a High Performance Team. According to my numbers, so are approximately 70% of the rest of your peers.
If you’ve been part of a HPT, please jump in and add to the flip chart list above. Help answer some or all of the following:
- What was your HPT experience like?
- What conditions were in place in your organization that allowed this team to develop?
- Have you been able to replicate this experience more than once?
- What does leadership do right to enable high performance?
- And any others that you care to mention.
Thanks for diving in and sharing your experiences. We all would like to win the Super Bowl at least once. Although twice or three times wouldn’t be bad either.
Leadership Lessons from the Road
Filed under: Career, Decision-Making, Leadership, Project Management
One of the great things about leading workshops with talented professionals is how much I learn about the very real challenges that people face in trying to get work done inside their organizations.
I had the great privilege of facilitating a workshop called Leader Mastery for Technical Professionals at The Data Warehouse Institute’s World Conference in Las Vegas this past week. Kudos to the team at TDWI for producing an outstanding educational conference and for their usual flawless arrangements.
A special thanks to the group of great professionals that had the courage at a technically focused conference to attend a day-long session on a topic that would have many heading in the opposite direction. This group was engaged, hungry for knowledge to improve their performance and excited about sharing ideas, challenges and best practices with each other. The pleasure was all mine!
After spending a day together helping this group develop a better context for what it means to lead and the principles and practices that will support their development as effective leaders, a number of themes about their challenges emerged from the discussions. These include:
- Gaining more context for their firm’s strategies as a means of better linking team goals and priorities to the organization’s priorities.
- Dealing with the very real challenges of building high performance teams across cultures, geographies and time-zones.
- Leading teams that increasingly include external contractors that don’t necessarily have the same level of commitment and share the same level of accountability.
- Improving mastery of soft skills that promote performance including: coaching and feedback, talent development and decision-making.
- Gaining better support from HR to facilitate talent development and team strengthening versus the still all-too-common policing that seems to emanate from this functional area.
- Breaking the vicious cycle of promoting the best technical contributors into a nightmare as they try and build bench strength.
- Finding ways to work effectively and collaboratively in matrix environments.
My message in these sessions is always that effective leadership and effective leadership development practices serve as the foundation of organizational performance excellence. What I hear consistently as I run these programs as well as when I engage with MBA students is an intense desire on the part of the individuals to contribute at a higher level.
I also hear significant frustration at the ridiculous cultural, managerial and procedural impediments that they face when trying to innovate and drive change. These people want to create and belong to high performance teams and organizations. Most confess that all too often, this is not the case.
My bottom-line for this quick post from the road is for senior leadership to focus on breaking down barriers that inhibit performance and seek ways to set your talent free.
Now more than ever, you and your organization require all hands to be contributing, innovating and seeking ways to create value. It’s time to get out of your executive meetings, clear your agendas, start asking questions, listen carefully and then do something. You are wasting remarkable opportunities to improve, and that’s not a winning approach in this market.
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