EFFECTIVE TEAMWORK
Why competitive individualism needs to be replaced by teamwork
Allyn Bradford, Adjunct Instructor
Humanities, Social Sciences, and Management Department
In today's workplace project leaders need to solve intricate problems and to
take ideas from their initial stage through a series of complex processes to a successful
completion. This kind of work cannot be done alone. There are just too many demands,
task requirements and varied sources of information required to do it without the
support of others.
The following incident illustrates the limitations of competitive individualism can
be replaced by teamwork:
Jeannie was a highly efficient, aggressive, competitive Vice President. But her project
team was in disarray. Though he had an MBA from a prestigious university on the East
Coast, she knew nothing about teamwork. Her attitude was that she was the boss and
others were expected others to comply. They didnít.
One Monday morning she was called into the CEOís office. "Get them to work together
or youíre fired!" was what Jeannie heard.
Upon hearing this, Jeannie was bright enough to find ways to completely reorient
herself and her team. The results were astonishing.
She and her team learned how to listen with empathy, build ideas together and support
each other in achieving individual goals. She made an 180 degree turn from the old,
command and control model to one which was interactive, supportive and cooperative.
As a result, her team became number one in the company.
Though it has a happy ending, this brief story indicates how an obsolete leadership
model can alienate the best resource we have: the people who work cooperatively with
us.
"In our present time, we must begin to celebrate collective entrepreneurship",
says Robert Reich, the Harvard economist, in an article describing how the team,
not the individual, is the hero. To make our corporate systems work, he says, we
need "endeavors in which the whole of the effort is greater than the sum of
individual contributions. We need to honor our teams more, our aggressive leaders
and maverick geniuses less." (Reich 77-78)
According to Reich, the "myth of individualism" came into our culture through
the popular stories of Horatio Alger in the last century. Ragged Dick, the
hero of these stories, rose from a lowly station in life by dint of individual
effort to earn a respectable job and the promise of a better life. The heroic individual
became our cultural ideal.
In today workplace project leaders need to solve intricate problems and to take ideas
from their initial stage through a series of complex processes to a successful completion.
This kind of work cannot be done alone. There are just too many demands, task requirements
and varied sources of information required to do it without the support of others.
The following incident illustrates the limitations of competitive individualism can
be replaced by teamwork:
Jeannie was a highly efficient, aggressive, competitive Vice President. But her project
team was in disarray. Though he had an MBA from a prestigious university on the East
Coast, she knew nothing about teamwork. Her attitude was that she was the boss and
others were expected others to comply. They didnít.
One Monday morning she was called into the CEOís office. "Get them to work together
or youíre fired!" was what Jeannie heard.
Upon hearing this, Jeannie was bright enough to find ways to completely reorient
herself and her team. The results were astonishing.
She and her team learned how to listen with empathy, build ideas together and support
each other in achieving individual goals. She made an 180 degree turn from the old,
command and control model to one which was interactive, supportive and cooperative.
As a result, her team became number one in the company.
Though it has a happy ending, this brief story indicates how an obsolete leadership
model can alienate the best resource we have: the people who work cooperatively with
us.
"In our present time, we must begin to celebrate collective entrepreneurship",
says Robert Reich, the Harvard economist, in an article describing how the team,
not the individual, is the hero. To make our corporate systems work, he says, we
need "endeavors in which the whole of the effort is greater than the sum of
individual contributions. We need to honor our teams more, our aggressive leaders
and maverick geniuses less." (Reich 77-78)
According to Reich, the "myth of individualism" came into our culture through
the popular stories of Horatio Alger in the last century. Ragged Dick, the
hero of these stories, rose from a lowly station in life by dint of individual
effort to earn a respectable job and the promise of a better life. The heroic individual
became our cultural ideal.
The dominant corporate culture still promotes the tradition of heroic individualism
in which the boss gets credit for what others have done. The strong focus we have
on individual achievement in our culture discounts other people and how we need them
to accomplish our goals. No wonder so many people feel depressed in the workplace
today! They are, as Reich indicates, overburdened by the weight of an outworn cultural
myth.
In her insightful book about contemporary organizations Margaret Wheatley says that:
"Loneliness has pervaded not only our science, but whole cultures. In America
we have raised individualism to its highest expression, each of us protecting our
boundaries, asserting our rights, creating a culture that ëleaves the individual
suspended in glorious, but terrifying isolation.í" (Wheatley 30)
We have all learned at home at school and on the job to compete as individuals for
awards, attention and prizes. But the reality is that, more often than not, it is
through teamwork that we get things done.
Though the myth of individualism proclaimed that the key to the great "American
Dream" was to be found through individual competition, it is really not so.
To be a lone individual without support, surrounded by adversaries, in the corporate
culture is more like the American Nightmare.
Working Together
Team skills are quite different from those of competing individuals.
They involve cooperation, mutual support and accountability to the team. These skills
are needed in families for members to support and encourage each other. They are
also needed at school for students to learn together. And they are needed on the
job in managing projects, making informed decisions and solving intricate problems.
These skills can expand limited resources, develop new ideas and to build viable
relationships An individual alone has but a limited perception of the range
of possibilities in a situation. A team taps into a variety of perceptions and so
widens the scope of available information, options and ideas. When various heads
come together in teamwork--which means listening, developing ideas and building on
each otherís insights--not only are more ideas generated but also a mutual acceptance
and trust builds among the participants through the interaction.
The quality and effectiveness of individual strategies is also greatly enhanced when
team members constructively question each othersí thought process. A team can help
clarify hidden factors, such as the nature of the resistance or the level of trust
in a particular situation. The interaction that comes from working and thinking together
in a team also helps an individual avoid making assumptions that are not reality
based. Team members do this by asking questions such as: "Is the data sufficient?"
"Is it accurate?" or "What is the source?"
For example, a Customer Education department I worked with in a Midwestern corporation
assumed quite naturally that their teaching was up to date. That was until one member
of their education team happened to overhear some customers questioning whether they
were getting the right information on how to run the expensive, new equipment they
had just bought. At this point questions, like those indicated above, were raised.
When they checked it out, they were shocked to find that their instructions were
obsolete.
Consequently, with the help of upper management, they set up an interdepartmental
team to keep them current in their presentations about company products consisting
of representatives from engineering, marketing and production. If any of their educational
materials were inaccurate or out of date, it would show up at these meetings, not
in presentations to customers.
Team Learning
Of course not all teams are well organized. Nor do all team members understand the
real meaning of teamwork. A poorly organized team probably functions worse than a
collection of competing individuals.
Teams need to learn certain skills as a team to function effectively. Peter
Senge coined the phrase "team learning" to show how teams go through the
steps in the learning process together, not just as individuals. That means
they are willing to experiment and learn from their results by sharing insights,
reflecting on outcomes and really listening to each other.
According to A. J. Chopra, an expert in innovative team process, "If you use
peopleís heads in a good way, theyíll let you borrow their hearts." You do this,
Chopra says, by really listening for what is of value in what they say. "New
ideas rarely come to mind fully formed, so they are vulnerable to attack. To voice
such ideas is to risk being ridiculed or thought impractical or even irresponsible.
If people feel that they can take such risks with you in a way that is not only safe
but productive, then working with you becomes a positive experience." (Chopra
10-12)
Teams learn to function effectively when they provide much needed guidance and support
to individual members. Teams can fill the gap left by the downsizing of middle managers.
As teams fill this gap, they give individuals a place to belong in the organizational
system.
How Teams Fill the Gap
According to the book, Wisdom of Teams "a real team autonomously develops it
own common purpose, performance goals, working approach and methods for mutual accountability"
In other words, they organize themselves. This stands in contrast to "pseudo
teams" which call themselves teams but are really just competing individuals."
(Katzenbach and Smith 61-64)
Team members can help each other by developing a system for supporting their individual
goals. After setting their team performance goals a self-organizing team can set
then cooperate in achieving their individual goals. If team members really do learn
how to develop and train each other, their competence will improve and so will their
morale and their performance as well.
Real teams provide the support individuals need to manage their way through the complex
problems and issues that confront them. It is a lot easier to get recognition and
help from the members of your team than it is to try to get the attention of a boss
that is too busy to give you the time.
Becoming a "member" of a team is important to new people, in an organization
too. New hires are keenly sensitive to signals that indicate how they will be treated
by others. They carefully watch how others respond to what they say and do because
they know that the way they get treated will largely determine their success in the
organization
A well functioning team interacts directly with its members in an intermeshed set
of relationships based on trust that constantly gives support and guidance to the
individuals involved. When this happens, individual performance in the team
exceeds what any one of them could do alone.
Professionals
The role of people at work today has shifted from a passive one in which they followed
orders, to an active one in which they take informed risks. Those once known as "Workers"
in the old bureaucratic system, have become "Professionals" in todayís
complex workplace. That calls for the use of initiative by well informed people who
can make intelligent decisions. (Hammer 1-15)
These professionals need teams to manage complex processes, to network with a variety
of resources and to do creative problem solving. Teams provide the means, as well
as the practice and coaching required to achieve competence in doing these things,
as noted before.
Teams do not replace the traditional organizational structure. Rather they work within
it to offer individuals a more dynamic process and a creative energy flow throughout
the organization.
For example, the administrative personnel of a mid-sized company I worked with on
the East Cost created an innovative new process in their organization system: a problem
solving support group. These administrators were people who work as secretaries and
receptionists. They had never before met as team. But, in the midst of a training
program, they used a little creative imagination to create a new entity. Now they
meet once a week with their supervisor to help each other solve the problems they
have with indifferent bosses, irate clients and unreliable suppliers. They fine tune
their problem solving skills as they work together on their own real issues.
Synergy
As noted above, synergy can multiply a teamís resources far beyond the limitations
of the individual contributors. It happens when team members work cooperatively to
share ideas, recognize the value of each member's contribution and jointly craft
those ideas into viable options.
In a recent book on biology and social systems, Kevin Kelly points out how a single
honey bee can do nothing by itself. But in the hive it becomes part of a highly productive
operation to make honey. There occurs in this process, Kelly says, "a hive mind"
consisting of many individual bees working together collectively. (Kelly 11).
Synergy multiplies the resources of team members through the interaction of a variety
of contributors who see a problem from diverse perspectives. When this happens the
collective brain, or what Kelly would call the "hive mind", of the team
takes on an enriched and enlarged life of its own which is exciting to all involved
and can produce highly innovative results.
"Our team is like a blueberry pancake" a member of a creative team on the
West Coast once told me during a training session. He was speaking of how leadership
operates in his team. "Itís flat", he said. "Weíre all equal. But
there are the blueberries. They are the ones who get the action going." Taking
initiative in setting a goal and making a commitment to bring about constructive
results puts a person in a leadership role, like those "blueberries".
Peter Block, a prominent organizational consultant, describes this kind of leadership
in terms of commitment to a personal vision: "The essence of political skill
is building support", he says. "This takes place through dialogue and the
most compelling dialogue we can have is about our vision. Leadership is keeping others
focused on our vision and this means we have to get comfortable talking about it."
(Block 121 )
A New Model for Leadership
A model invented and promoted by Synectics, Inc., works effectively for this kind
of leadership. In this model, leadership is not fixed in one place--or even in any
one person.
The Synectics model actually requires dual leadership to make their process work:
one person facilitates the process, the other is committed the to the pursuit of
a vision or a goal. The team members work together to generate ideas to help the
goal leader create a viable achievement strategy to implement his or her vision.
In this model individuals readily set goals that are aligned with team and organizational
objectives. Even though most new ideas are incomplete and easily destroyed, as noted
previously, skillful facilitation can manage the process to create an environment
that allows creativity to flourish.
This process works best if the facilitator rotates from one meeting to the next.
That way fresh energy comes with each new process leader. Of course it can be quite
a challenge for some team members to facilitate the process for the first time, but
with help from the team they can readily acquire the needed skills, as in the previous
example of the administrative personnel team.
This leadership model is more fully described by Vincent Nolan, Chairman of Synectics,
England: "The key to better management of meetings is to split the chairpersonís
role into its two functionsÖThe process manager (or facilitator) will concentrate
on the communications traffic control, and while he or she is doing so, take no part
in the content of the meeting. The content responsibility will be handled by the
individual whose job responsibility is most directly affected by the item under discussion.
The two functions of process management and content direction are not only distinctóthey
need to be kept separateÖeach one demands full time attention."(Nolan 156-7)
Managers who support the use of this process can save time and energy taken up in
coaching individuals. Team members who learn the process can coach each other. It
also helps team members use more initiative and solve their own problems.
A group of union workers I worked with in a small town in Eastern Massachusetts exemplified
this process can work by how well they took hold of this process. They were engineers
in the Department of Public. None of them ever conducted a meeting before. But after
they learned how to work the process, their productivity soared because they realized
they could solve their problems by themselves.
Conclusion
With the support of management, and by working cooperatively, effective teams can
readily help individuals adapt to new situations, solve intricate problems and create
constructive change in the workplace. Individuals are most effective when they do
not work alone but with others on a team.
Sources:
Block, P.: The Empowered Manager, Jossey-Bass, 1990
Chopra, A.J.: Managing the People Side of Innovation, Kumarian Press, 1999
Hammer, M.: Re-Engineering the Corporation, Harper Business, 1993
Katzenbach and Smith: The Wisdom of Teams, Harper Business,1993
Kelley, K: Out of Control, The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the
Economic World, Addison-Wesley, l994
Reich, R. The Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneurship Reconsidered, The Team
as Hero, May-June 1987
Nolan,V: The Innovatorís Handbook, Problem Solving, Communication and Teamwork,
Penguin Books, 1989
Wheatley, M.: Leadership and the New Science, Berrett-Koehler, 1994