Great Teams Build Great Cultures
People
sometimes tell me that The
Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization (Harvard Business School Press, 1993) helped them
understand the difference between great team experiences and terrible team
experiences. These readers recognized the value of what my coauthor, Doug
Smith, and I called a “real team” — a team composed of people committed to
common purposes, goals, and working approaches accepting of the diversity in
others’ skills and perspectives. In real teams, members hold themselves and
their teammates mutually accountable, because of their emotional commitment to
the work and to one another. That’s how they get things done rapidly and
effectively.
But
all too often, these teams act as stand-alone entities within a larger, more
indifferent culture, where people feel little or no connection to one another
and to the work. This invariably limits the effectiveness of the teams. Indeed,
it helps explain a research finding by Stanford University professor Behnam Tabrizi
that 75 percent of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional. They lack clarity
about their goals and accountability. They struggle more than teams that exist
within a particular business or function, and there’s a reason for that:
Because they are broad-based, it’s far more difficult for them to develop the
personal respect that leads team members to care about their work together.
Many
of us know the combination of despair, frustration, and amusement that people
can feel as a result of being isolated from a culture, while at the same time
being part of a great team. This bittersweet feeling is captured, for instance,
in some classic modern novels. I’m thinking of books such as Catch-22 by
Joseph Heller and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken
Kesey. In these novels, protagonists create their own groups of disenfranchised
people, within a larger culture that tries to shut them down. They are, in
effect, real teams. They are emotionally energized and wholly committed to a
goal, but their goal is typically mere survival as the disaffected individuals
face off against the larger organization. These types of books often end
semi-tragically; the team dissolves, its members scatter, and the larger
organizational culture doesn’t change.
But
could something more productive happen in a real-life organization? Can a large
company gain the emotional commitment of its employees through their experience
of working in real teams? I believe the answer is yes. But to build the right
kind of atmosphere, teams can’t just assume that the spark of mutual good
feeling will be there when they need it. They need to cultivate it in the
organization at large. Rather than adopting a passive-aggressive attitude to
oppose the company, as the flyers of Catch-22 did, or fighting
against it, as the hospitalized residents of Cuckoo’s Nest did,
they need to see their team’s activity as a source of emotional energy for the
company as a whole.
A
recent New York Times article by
Charles Duhigg captured one of the qualities that can help a team foster a
better culture around it. The article recounted research, conducted by Google
and others, on the distinguishing capabilities of teams. Researchers found one
fundamental indicator of well-functioning teams: Their members were in sync
with one another through a few behavioral team norms. These norms were
unwritten rules that determined, for example, how to conduct meetings. (“Do we
take turns speaking, or jump in when we have an important idea?”) In our work
on Wisdom of Teams, we called this a commitment to the specifics of
their “working approach.”
The
specific norms didn’t matter. But it mattered that there were a few strong
ground rules, which allowed people to feel confident with one another. In other
words, the researchers found a good team was a “safe space” where any team
member could express an idea freely and without recrimination. Team members
could take chances, which enabled them to capitalize on opportunities quickly,
innovatively, and with great determination. In dysfunctional teams, on the
other hand, members did not accept others’ ideas; people were afraid of taking
risks, of speaking openly, and of offering up those fast insights that might
not be based in logic but that are often valuable.
It turned out that the purely functional
aspects of a team’s performance — the members’ professional backgrounds,
experience, drive, or intelligence, for example — were not as relevant to
success as this safe-space facility. Moreover, once these teams were operating
smoothly, they contributed more effectively to the larger culture of the
company.
In short, when the emotional energy of a team
is reinforced through a few clear practices, the team continues to develop its
mastery and mutual commitment. Teams of this sort build and sustain sources of
emotional energy that ripple out into the culture of the company around them.
Other teams can then draw on that emotional energy, and the culture itself
grows more adept, energized, and purposeful.
My
upcoming book, The Critical Few, details an approach of an
effective, tested methodology for aligning a team’s emotions and habits with
those of the larger organization in this way. Companies can accomplish
alignment by focusing on a critical few behaviors that spread across groups,
once they are recognized. These can be individual behaviors — for example, a
gracious way of responding to business callers — but they are most effective
when they become team behaviors that lead to positive business results. Leaders
may, for example, always open a meeting by “checking in” — to make sure
everyone at the meeting says something about how they are feeling. Or the
members may set a norm where problems are raised in team meetings, even if
there is not an obvious solution (a countercultural norm in many companies).
Teams that find the right kinds of practices and reinforce them, time and
again, by insisting on following them, have greater influence and creativity.
Simply put, team members hold one another accountable for adhering to these
behaviors. Moreover, teams like this can become role models for other work
groups.
Your company undoubtedly has some of those
practices in place among its most effective teams. When you find those
specifics and talk about them, and begin to practice them more explicitly, you
provide positive reinforcement to the best aspects of your culture. Within a
few months, these practices accelerate, influencing others in the company.
That’s how you build specific traits into a culture that nurtures its
top-performing teams, furthering the emotional energy of both the teams
themselves and the broader organization.
Jon Katzenbach
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Great-Teams-Build-Great-Cultures?gko=3388b&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20160519&utm_campaign=fixed
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