Whenever I am asked to speak on the subject of teamwork, I begin with a game. My family loves word games, and anagrams is one of our favorites. Anagrams is played by taking a word or phrase and rearranging the letters to form other words. No slang, no proper nouns, no abbreviations, and no words less than three letters.
On a flip chart I write the words One Audacious Claim and shout, “Go!” Each person has 60 seconds to write down as many words as they can. At the end of 60 seconds people in the room have formed their words, some as few as 5 or 6 and others as many as 15 or 16.
Then I put everyone in groups of four, have them choose a recorder, and repeat the process with the same three words. At the end of 60 seconds these small groups have come up with 30, 40, and even 50 words from One Audacious Claim.
This is living proof of the audacious claim made by the brilliant Patrick Lencioni in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,
“Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare. A friend of mine, the founder of a company that grew to a billion dollars in annual revenue, best expressed the power of teamwork when he once told me, ‘If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, any time.'”
WHAT IS A TEAM?
Most teams, however, are a team in name only, not a fully functioning work group. What is a team? A team is a small group of 3 – 12 people working together who do things, decide things, recommend things, or run things actively experiencing these four dynamics:
T – TRUSTING RELATIONSHIPS
The first dynamic that makes a team a team is the quality of relationship that exists among its members. Real teams know each other well and trust each other explicitly. This takes place over time as each of the members, in their own unique way, connects with the other members of the group and finds them to be people they respect and believe in. This cannot be forced or the power of teamwork will be nullified right from the start.
What many teams do, instead of investing the time needed to build this kind of unity, settle for unity’s evil twin: uniformity. Unity, as opposed to uniformity, is forged through the rigors of discussion, dialogue, and even debate. No issue is off the table with teams that build trust like this. Team members are open about their mistakes and weaknesses, they ask for help when they need it, and receive input from others without being defensive.
E – ESTABLISHED PURPOSE, VALUES, AND GOALS
Every pilot that takes an airplane into the sky, commercial or private, files a flight plan. The flight plan clearly states where that plane is going, how long they intend to be in the air, and when they are going to land. You can’t take off without one.
Dynamic teams do the same. They define their central purpose, that is, WHY they exist as a group. Along with that purpose they identify the core values of the group, or HOW they will conduct themselves. Then, with those two in place, they set clear goals to measure their progress, that is, WHERE they are going.
Do things happen that can take you off course of your plan? Certainly. No one can perfectly predict the weather or the future. Pilots recognize this and are always making mid-course corrections as they fly. Dynamic teams use their “flight plan” to get them in the air, executing against it along the way, and making changes when needed to get them to their intended destination.
A – ACTIVE PARTICIPATION BY ALL THE MEMBERS OF THE GROUP
The third dynamic of effective teams addresses how group members function when they are together. Two A’s actually come into play here, All the members of the group Actively participating in discussion, decision making, and doing what the group has set out to accomplish.
Please note that this is not Equal participation by Every member of the group. That too would spell the word, but wrongly, TEEM. Everyone in a work group will not be equally experienced, equally educated, and equally gifted for a particular project. As a result the ball, if you will, does not need to be distributed identically. But for a team to be a team, everyone must have a part of the action that is best suited to them, one dribbling, one passing, one shooting, and one rebounding.
Here are some questions to ask about your team along these lines.
When you are discussing issues, does everyone have a chance to voice what’s on their mind? When a decision is made, is everyone polled for their perspective before the decision is finalized? When jobs are assigned, does everyone have a significant part of the project? These are just a few of the ways active participation by all the members of the group is assured.
M – MUTUAL ACCOUNTABILITY
Who’s the leader of your team? Don’t answer too quickly because that’s a trick question.
Yes, most every team has a formal leader. But teams will only get so far when they are dependent on him or her. Teams that truly perform at the highest level of effectiveness have broken free of their dependence on a formal leader and function in a zone of mutual accountability, each team member taking responsibility for the performance of the team as seriously as if they were the formal leader. In fact, if you were a fly on the wall at the meeting of a team that has grown to this point, you would not be able to tell who really was the formal leader of the group.
Competitive bicycle racing has a word for this dynamic: paceline.
A paceline occurs when cyclists ride in straight-line formation with a rider in the lead and the rest drafting off of him. That lead position takes the most effort, but after a few miles the point rider slips into the back of the line and another cyclist leads the group. In this way the paceline shares leadership, conserves the energy of all, and delivers better performance. Teams with mutual accountability experience the same as the answer to the question, “Who’s the leader of your team?” really becomes irrelevant.
HERE’S ANOTHER AUDACIOUS CLAIM
Based on decades of consulting in the field of organizational performance, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith echo Patrick Lencioni’s previous point in their bestselling book The Wisdom of Teams, “We believe that teams-real teams, not just groups that management calls ‘teams’-should be the basic unit of performance for most organizations, regardless of size. In any situation requiring the real-time combination of multiple skills, experiences, and judgments, a team inevitably gets better results than a collection of individuals operating within combined job roles and responsibilities.” It’s how to win at anagrams and how to dominate the marketplace.